Dr. Erin Baumgartner is the director of the Houston Education Research Consortium at Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, which bridges research, policy, and practice to solve critical problems facing the nation’s fifth-largest metropolitan area.

In partnership with Houston-area school districts serving over 700,000 students, teams under her direction are pursuing a research agenda focused on equity, opportunity, and access for students. Topics include early childhood education, social and emotional learning, postsecondary readiness, school choice, teaching and staffing.

Baumgartner earned her doctorate from Pennsylvania State University’s dual-degree program in sociology and demography. She holds a master’s in sociology from the University of Chicago and a master’s in education with an emphasis in measurement, evaluation, statistics and assessment from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She earned a bachelor’s in sociology and marketing from the University of Notre Dame.

She has been an instructor at Penn State and Rice University and serves on the Early Childhood Research Quarterly editorial board. Her primary research and teaching interests are in sociology of education and family, social stratification and demography, the educational role of the family, research methods, and quantitative methods.