Dr. Rebecca Hinze-Pifer is an education researcher and former classroom teacher whose work closes the gap between rigorous evidence and actionable insight for education leaders. Over more than a decade of district-partnered research, she has led multi-year evaluations of major reforms in Chicago Public Schools including the removal of police officers from schools, alternative high school transfer policy, and the effects of community violence on student outcomes, briefing district leadership and reaching public audiences through the Chicago Tribune, Chalkbeat, and WBEZ. She has directed randomized controlled trials of school-based social-emotional interventions in the United States and internationally, including a 30-school RCT in El Salvador presented to the World Bank and USAID. Her methodological toolkit spans causal inference, longitudinal and geospatial data integration, and mixed-methods design, with particular interests in school discipline and safety, teacher retention, and K–12 administrative data. She has served on the faculty of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she taught doctoral quantitative methods, and holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy from the University of Chicago — having started out, improbably, in astrophysics.