AP-NORC Center Experts

Steven Neil Durlauf is the Steans Professor in Educational Policy at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. Prior to this appointment, he was William F. Vilas Research Professor and Kenneth J. Arrow Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA.

Durlauf received a BA in economics from Harvard in 1980 where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and a Ph.D. in economics from Yale in 1986. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, Fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. In 2011, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is co-director of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group, an international research network linking scholars across disciplines in the study of inequality and the sources of human flourishing and destitution. Durlauf is the current Editor of the Journal of Economic Literature.

Sarah Davis Redman is a principal research scientist with nearly 20 years of mixed-methods research and evaluation experience with a primary focus on qualitative methods. Her research areas include the impact of climate change (specifically natural disasters and extreme weather) on morbidity and mortality, health disparities, and sexual and reproductive health.

Redman currently leads NORC’s disaster mortality work including a large cross-center project for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) conducting evaluation and research activities aimed at improving processes for identifying and reporting disaster-related deaths. This work will enhance the overall understanding of the impact of disasters and extreme weather on human health and provide insights that may guide future disaster preparedness and response efforts. This project builds on the work she led for CDC developing a toolkit and accompanying training for medicolegal death investigators to collect data after natural disaster and extreme weather events. Redman recently completed three other projects in this area: a rapid needs assessment and evaluation of state provision of trainings and resources developed after Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria in 2017; examination of disability-inclusive disaster and emergency preparedness, planning, and response in the United States; and an environmental scan on the differential impact of climate change on underserved populations and promising approaches to climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience.

Redman’s program evaluation work focuses on helping organizations measure their own success in reaching their project goals and achieving their intended outcomes. She is the co-project director of the Office of Minority Health’s Performance Improvement Measurement System (OMH PIMS) project where she oversees the design and implementation of complex cross-site evaluations and manages NORC staff provision of technical assistance to 16 different grant portfolios focused on strategies to reduce health disparities and address social determinants of health. In addition, Redman currently leads a process and outcome evaluation of the American Cancer Society’s Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) funded Culture of Health grant to advance health equity through a cancer lens and make health equity a shared value. In her early years at NORC, Redman led an evaluation of a 3-arm randomized prevention trial for lesbian and bisexual women over the age of 40 as part of the Healthy Weight of Lesbians and Bisexual Women (HWLB) study for the HHS Office of Women’s Health (OWH).

Redman’s work in sexual and reproductive health includes leading a four-year evaluation of Illinois Contraceptive Access Now (ICAN!) — a statewide initiative to advance reproductive health equity by improving the quality and coverage of contraceptive care at community health centers. Redman was also the evaluation PI on the Chicago Department of Public Health’s Teen Pregnancy Prevention (TPP) grant where she led the evaluation of their school-based sexual health education and sexually transmitted infection testing curriculum in Chicago high schools. The evaluation utilized a quasi-experimental design and assessed the impact of the Chicago Healthy Adolescents and Teens (CHAT) Program on knowledge and testing behavior among students in the intervention schools compared to those in matched schools.

Prior to joining NORC, Redman worked as a qualitative analyst on the Chicago Health, Environmental Exposure, and Recreation Study (CHEERS), where she examined the best ways to communicate with local Chicago waterway users about water quality and safety and an evaluation consultant with the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health (ICAH) while earning her doctorate. For her dissertation work, Redman focused her research at the intersection of public health and communications exploring how the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine was portrayed in television ads and how this framing influences the underlying beliefs about getting vaccinated among parents and young adults. Before earning her Ph.D., Redman spent time in London working in autism and disability policy research and in Washington D.C. as a health research analyst.

Adam Zelizer studies legislative politics, with a focus on causal inference. His research examines how legislators make decisions – for example, how they acquire expertise from policy research and influence one another through deliberation – and the effects of individual decision-making processes on policy outcomes. One goal of this research is to figure out which legislative processes work, in the sense of leading to more informed, effective, and broadly-supported public policies, and which don’t.

He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University in 2018. He also holds a BA in Political Economy from Columbia University. He joins Harris as an Assistant Professor after spending a year as a postdoctoral researcher and instructor at Harris, during which he taught Analytical Politics II and Field Experiments for Public Policy. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, Cato Institute, Open Society Foundations, and Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab.

Dan Malato is a senior research director with the Public Affairs and Media Research department. He has more than eight years of experience analyzing and reporting on survey data. During his tenure, he has worked as the project manager and lead analyst on dozens of projects, including many with The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. He has experience with questionnaire development, data management, data review, analysis, and reporting on a wide variety of survey projects of varying complexities.

Most recently, he has served as project manager on The Long-Term Care Poll, a series of surveys conducted by The AP-NORC Center sinace 2013 that explore issues related to aging in America. In 2018 and 2020, Dan led the data management and data delivery for AP VoteCast, a groundbreaking election survey that allows for more precise measures of voters’ opinions. These projects each included more than 130,000 interviews conducted in the week before the election and involved rapid, continuous data delivery on Election Night for use in news coverage nationwide.

Dan holds a M.A. in Political Science from The George Washington University. Prior to joining NORC, he worked as a research assistant at the George Washington Institute of Public Policy.