# Q&A with Nora Gannon-Slater, Cohort 8 SDP Fellow Alumna September 12, 2024 - [ Blog ](/news-categories/blog) *This Q&A is part of an SDP Blog series profiling members of the 2023 – 2025 SDP Alumni Advisory Board. All posts from this series may be found* [*here*](/news/alumni-advisory-board)*.* ![Nora Headshot](/sites/g/files/omnuum4446/files/sdp/files/ngs.png) [Nora Gannon-Slater](https://cepr.harvard.edu/people/nora-gannon-slater) is a Cohort 8 (2016-2018) alumna of the Strategic Data Project (SDP) Fellowship. She was nominated into the fellowship by [Breakthrough Schools,](https://breakthroughschools.org/) a network of public charter schools in Ohio, where she worked as the Director of Performance and Data Analytics. As a fellow, Nora laid the groundwork for organizational data strategy to identify and establish data and analytic priorities to drive individual and organizational focus on goals, strengths, progress, and challenges within and across the Breakthrough Schools charter network. Currently, Nora is a Senior Researcher at the American Institutes for Research (AIR) where she develops and directs research studies and technical assistance projects on district improvement, equity assessments, and use of research evidence. Her research interests include brokering and translating research evidence for use by policymakers and practitioners; program evaluation; data literacy for educators and non-profits; and issues of equity in access to educational outcomes in K12 settings. Prior to her current role, Nora was the Managing Director of Student Outcomes Data and Reporting at Teach for America (TFA), where she was responsible for designing and implementing organizational strategy, including data architecture, governance, and literacy, as well as setting an agenda to gain direct access to student outcomes data in service of TFA’s One Day Goal. Nora holds a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology with a specialization in Measurement, Evaluation, Research, and Statistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. **What drew you to the SDP Fellowship?** My research has always focused on data-driven decision-making and evidence-based policy and practice. After I finished grad school, I decided I wanted to work side-by-side with practitioners. When I was working as a Research and Evaluation Coordinator for a district in New Jersey, an SDP Fellow alum from Cohort 6 and a dear friend of mine from grad school, Matt Linick, suggested that I apply for the SDP Fellowship. He helped connect me with Breakthrough Schools, who later nominated me to become their fellow... and the rest is history. **What is the most memorable or impactful moment or experience from your time as an SDP Fellow?** It is really hard to list just one memorable moment—I feel like I could tell you one from each and every event I've attended! But, I distinctly remember leaving my Cohort 8 Orientation in awe of the talent and sheer brilliance of my cohort mates and feeling like I had finally found “my people.” I still feel this way every time I am at an SDP event or when I ask the wider SDP network for input, support, and feedback. **Tell us about your current job!** My current job at AIR is great because I get to work on lots of different projects that touch data work in a variety of ways. Often, I'm partnering with local, state, and education non-profit agencies to strengthen their capacity to use data, research, and evaluation to support continuous improvement and accountability efforts. My happy place is coaching education agency leadership, research, and data folks to better leverage their data systems to meet their needs and developing workshops and resources to build capacity to do data work. I also get to support our school and district improvement and equity audit work by helping teammates and partners maximize the availability of extant district data and building analytic, reporting, and data visualization templates to support knowledge translation and use. Recently, I've started conducting what I like to call "data therapy." In this role, I am facilitating conversations between different groups of people about challenges they encounter in partnership work related to data, including data access, sharing, quality and governance, and build consensus around research and evaluation questions, metrics and business rules for continuous improvement and accountability purposes. I still get to play with cool datasets and make fun data visualizations, too! **What skills did you gain from your time as an SDP Fellow that you find helpful in your current role?** My time as an SDP Fellow taught me how to show people that data work really is people work and that most technical challenges in data require adaptive solutions that attend to people's attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors about the role data plays in their work. **What advice would you give to current or prospective SDP Fellows?** SDP Fellows come from all walks of life with wonderfully diverse professional and personal backgrounds to join this program—there are no "typical" people in SDP. You won't find a more dedicated, talented, curious, collaborative, and down-to-earth group of data geeks in pursuit of equity and excellence anywhere else on this planet. **When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?** I never really thought about a career much as a kid, but my dad told me about a plan I had made one day in which I'd own a huge plot of land where I could provide refuge for shelter cats and dogs and have an Olympic-sized swimming pool where everyone who wanted could come and learn to swim. It hasn’t happened yet but I’m still dreaming! **What are you reading?** I just finished an incredibly lyrical, heart-wrenching and inspiring memoir by Safiya Sinclair called [*How to Say Babylon: A Memoir*](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/How-to-Say-Babylon/Safiya-Sinclair/9781982132347). **What is something you enjoy in your free time?** Reading, swimming, boating, roller blading, hanging out with my family and pets, and ignoring email! 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