Vivian Allen is the Associate Director of the Center for Effective School Practices, where she provides advanced leadership and engaged oversight to the Center’s day-to-day operations striving to achieve optimal operational efficiencies within current university and stakeholder climates such that CESP may excel in meeting its existing award commitments, perform beyond stakeholder expectations, and further grow and develop in meaningful purposeful ways. Vivian closely supervises the CESP team to ensure the integrity of the research and methodological approaches, as well as the completion of related tasks on-time and up to CESP’s high-standards. She does so by focusing on the capacity building of individual team members and the organization as a whole to support healthy, strategic growth toward realizing the mission and vision of CESP. Vivian actively collaborates with faculty, staff, and external partners to ensure the rigor and relevance of CESP’s research portfolio with an eye toward efficient and effective project management in a fiscally sound manner. Beyond this, she actively partakes in research and evaluation projects and disseminates the work of the Center through written publications and presentations at conferences.

Vivian has extensive experience with evaluating programs and using this information in an iterative process of program refinement. Her undergraduate and graduate education focused on mathematics and analytical processing and she has extended this with a more recent emphasis on research methodologies with social science theoretical underpinnings. Additionally, she has spent over 20 years in financial management and program development within private industry and non-profit organizations and has a deep and sincere appreciation for the importance of relationship-building and authentic collaboration, open and honest communication, and the central role of third-party organizations in an educational research and policy context. Her education and experience allows her to serve CESP across the spectrum and her passion lies at the crux of CESP’s ultimate mission – to facilitate the translation of research into best practices with significant potential to uncover and address existing inequities and systemic bias in education.