Meet Melanie Ali, CoLab’s First Research Portfolio Officer

You spent most of your career as a researcher at the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. What does IES do?

Melanie: IES is the Department’s office for research, evaluation, and statistics. It does a lot: It leads the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the “nation’s report card”), funds research grants across areas like teaching, ed-tech, and STEM instruction, runs the What Works Clearinghouse, and conducts national evaluations of education policies and programs. That last piece is where I focused.

What did you take away from that experience?

Melanie: Working on large-scale evaluations taught me that a good research design is just the starting point. In the real world, things rarely go exactly as planned, and you have to know which trade-offs you can make without compromising the study’s ability to draw clear conclusions. Just as importantly, you have to understand your stakeholders — what they care about, what questions matter to them, and how to present findings in a way that actually resonates. Those are challenges every CoLab grantee will face, and I hope my experience can help.

How did your work influence federal education policy?

Melanie: A lot of the studies I worked on at IES were mandated by Congress — meaning legislation required the Department to evaluate specific programs. Findings went directly to Congress and fed into policy and funding discussions. Beyond that, Department offices would use our research to target technical assistance to grantees or to reshape program priorities. It was a real reminder that research can have a direct impact when it’s designed with the right questions in mind.

What attracted you to CoLab and the Constellation Fund?

Melanie: The effectiveness research focus, honestly. There are plenty of organizations funding studies in the social sector, but I hadn’t come across one with such a singular focus on building high-quality evidence for what works — and with such a clear commitment to strategies focused on fighting poverty.

What are you hoping to accomplish as CoLab’s first research portfolio officer?

Melanie: Three things. First, I want to help strengthen CoLab’s infrastructure for grant management so we can continue to be responsible stewards of funding as the organization grows. Second, I want to support grantees doing rigorous and policy-relevant research by being a thought partner on study design, connecting them to resources, and helping troubleshoot along the way. Third, I want to make sure findings actually reach the people who need to hear them: policymakers and funders.

What does good collaboration between researchers and nonprofits look like?

Melanie: I think there are two main ingredients: communication and independence.

On communication: Researchers need to genuinely understand how a program works, what the implementing organization sees as its core elements, and what barriers might get in the way. And it goes both ways —nonprofits need to understand what’s being asked of them and what they’ll get out of the study.

On independence: There needs to be a healthy firewall between the two partners such that the researchers are not invested in a particular outcome. This might sound like it’s in tension with good communication, but it’s not. Even the appearance of bias can erode trust in findings. In practice, that often looks like having a clear separation between who’s running the program and who’s evaluating it. This way results speak for themselves, whether positive or not.

You have a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology. What was the focus of your studies?

Melanie: Experimental psychology is really about applying rigorous quantitative methods to the study of behavior. In grad school, I was drawn to the intersection of psychology and law. Think: using randomized study designs to test how factors like the complexity of jury instructions affect verdicts. Studies like these have real implications for both criminal and civil law.

I’ve moved on from law, but the core approach is the same. Now the “behavior” I’m studying is how people respond to strategies designed to promote economic mobility — whether they’re gaining credentials, finding stable housing, securing good jobs.

What’s the state of longitudinal research on upward mobility today?

Melanie: Longitudinal research takes patience and good data. Ideally that means robust administrative records — state or national databases tracking outcomes like educational attainment and earnings at the individual level. Fortunately those databases exist, but they’re often fragmented and not always accessible to researchers. That said, there’s been real progress on methods that expand data access while protecting privacy, and I think we’ll see more longitudinal work as data systems become better connected.

Where do you see the biggest gaps?

Melanie: I’ll speak from an education research perspective since that’s my orientation. In K-12, there’s a lot of attention on short-term outcomes like test scores and attendance, and some research on medium-term outcomes like postsecondary enrollment. But we rarely follow people far enough into the future to know whether an intervention actually led to better housing, health, or economic outcomes. Education research tends not to take that long view. It also often misses the full picture of how people’s lives could be affected.

Last question — we hear you’re a big reader. Any fun recommendations?

Melanie: This is risky because I haven’t read her latest yet — but you really can’t go wrong with Tayari Jones. She and Khaled Hosseini are my favorites; they write beautifully but tend toward heavy topics. If you want something lighter, I’d go with Anna Johnston’s Borrowed Life of Fredrick Fife or Kevin Wilson’s Run for the Hills. Both are heartwarming with a touch of quirky.