Project Team
Michelle Van Noy (Principal Investigator) is Director of the Education and Employment Research Center at the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers. She has extensive experience conducting research on STEM education and workforce development and leading large-scale research projects. She is PI on Pathways to Technician Careers an ATE-targeted research project examining student decision-making about programs and careers in information technology, and co-PI on an NSF project, Pathways to Science and Engineering Professions: Persistence and Career Choice for Bachelor’s and Master’s Graduates, Who Goes on? Who Doesn’t? and Why? She has conducted research on higher education labor market responsiveness, community college workforce education programs in a range of sectors, community college student outcomes, and employer perceptions of associate degrees for IT technicians. She served on the National Academy of Science’s committee on Barriers and Opportunities for 2-year and 4-year STEM degrees.
Mark D’Amico (Co-Principal Investigator) is a Professor of Higher Education, University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Mark’s research centers on community college student success and workforce education, including the development of a noncredit typology that has been applied to multiple states and scholarly projects. Mark was a participant of the 2020 IPEDS Technical Review Panel on noncredit data, and published a recent paper on noncredit outcomes in partnership with the Iowa Department of Education. Prior to his current role, Mark served in senior leadership with a multi-campus college and a state technical college system.
Peter Riley Bahr is Vice President and Managing Research Director of the Strada Institute for the Future of Work, is a nationally recognized scholar and expert on postsecondary education, student outcomes, and economic mobility. The central aim of his research is ensuring that a high-quality college education, stable employment, and a family-sustaining wage are within reach of everyone.
Dr. Bahr focuses specifically on the role of public postsecondary institutions — especially community and technical colleges — in creating and advancing educational and economic opportunities for socioeconomically disadvantaged students, adult-age students beginning in or returning to college, individuals returning to the community after incarceration, and other disadvantaged groups. Working closely with policymakers and institutional leaders, his research directly informs policy and practice aimed at reducing inequality, achieving educational attainment goals, improving workforce opportunities, and strengthening state economic vitality and growth. Before joining Strada, Dr. Bahr served as a tenured associate professor in the University of Michigan’s Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education, where he built a multimillion dollar research program focused on educational pathways and workforce outcomes, as well as taught graduate-level classes in applied statistics.
Di Xu is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at UC, Irvine, and the faculty director of UCI’s Postsecondary Education Research & Implementation Institute. She is also a research affiliate at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research uses mixed research methods in assessing students’ educational pathways, success, and transition into the labor market, with a particular focus on students enrolled in community colleges.
Eliza Peterson is a Researcher with the Education and Employment Research Center. She is a graduate of the Rutgers University School of Arts and Sciences, earning her B.A. in American Studies in 2022. Her senior thesis “‘Meet Me Behind the Mall’: Reassessing the Social and Cultural Value of the American Shopping Mall” earned the Henry Rutgers Scholar Award and departmental honors. A portion of her thesis was published in the Aresty Rutgers Undergraduate Research Journal. In 2023, she earned her M.Ed. in Secondary Social Studies Education. Eliza has been on the EERC team since June 2020, where she has contributed to several studies and evaluations on topics like student decision making, workforce programs, and other topics within the world of community college education. Her research interests lie at the intersections between K-12 education, community colleges, workforce programming, and labor.
Melissa Quaal is Unit Administrator for the Education and Employment Research Center. She obtained her Master’s degree in Public Policy with a concentration in Community Development at the Bloustein School at Rutgers University and her Bachelor’s degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a double major in Economics and Social Work. As an administrator with a background in research on workforce development as well as the impact of poverty, Melissa is dedicated to uncovering the ways in which educational institutions can ameliorate poverty and develop pathways to greater equality.
Justin Vinton is a faculty Research Associate at the Education and Employment Research Center at the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. He studies labor and employment relations with a primary focus on worker voice and representation, skill provision and credentials, labor-management collaboration, and workforce and economic development. His current work examines the role of community colleges and other postsecondary training providers in economic development, and their growing coordination with employers, students, and other stakeholders to improve program implementation and data collection (both degree and non-degree). His other work focuses on the voice and complex roles of labor-management partnership stakeholders in US public education and healthcare.