Our Team
Ron Ferguson and Rob Ramsdell lead the Tripod Project. In addition to Ron and Rob’s leadership, a small core staff supports and operates the project. The Tripod Project is also able to tap its broad network of education professionals when additional resources are required.
Ronald F. Ferguson, Ph.D.
Ron Ferguson is an economist and Senior Research Associate at Harvard’s Weiner Center for Social Policy and has taught at Harvard since 1983. His teaching and publications cover a variety of issues related to education and economic development. Much of his research since the mid-1990s has focused on racial achievement gaps, appearing in publications of the National Research Council, the Brookings Institution, and the U.S. Department of Education, in addition to various books and scholarly journals. He participates in a variety of consulting and policy advisory activities, including work with school districts on closing achievement gaps. He is the founder and director of the Tripod Project for School Improvement and is also the Faculty Co-Chair and Director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard University. Ron earned an undergraduate degree from Cornell University and a Ph.D. from MIT, both in economics.
Rob Ramsdell, M.Ed.
Rob began his career as a high school social studies teacher and founded FreshPond Education in 1996. Since that time he has worked with hundreds of schools and districts to design and implement high quality school improvement programs and professional development initiatives. During a three year period from 2002-2005 Rob served as Senior Director of PBS TeacherLine, an online professional development initiative funded by the US Department of Education (www.pbs.org/teacherline). In 2007 FreshPond Education joined Cambridge Education where Rob serves as its Vice-President of School Improvement Services. Rob holds a B.A. from Brown University, an M.A. in educational administration from Teachers College, Columbia University, and an M.Ed. in educational technology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Analysts
Sarah Enterline, Ph.D.
Having recently graduated from Boston College with a Ph.D. in Educational Research, Measurement and Evaluation, Sarah is just beginning what she hopes will be a long career in educational research. She is a Research Fellow at Boston College, working on the Teachers for a New Era (TNE) grant. Her work includes designing, implementing, and reporting on several quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods studies aimed at creating a data-rich environment for policy and programmatic decisions. In addition to her work with TNE, Sarah consults regularly with educational research organizations in the Boston area on topics including research design, survey development and administration, and data analysis.
Erin Hardy, M.S.
Erin Hardy joined the Tripod Project team in July 2007. In addition to her work with the Tripod Project, Erin also serves as a Research Associate in the Women, Children, and Families Program at RTI International, performing social policy research related to various federally-funded initiatives. She has experience in quantitative and qualitative methods, primary and secondary data collection, data analysis, and producing cross-disciplinary literature reviews. Prior to joining the Tripod Project team, she spent five years working in public and private finance at Lehman Brothers. She worked for three years as an associate in public finance investment banking, performing quantitative and qualitative analyses. Erin earned her M.S. in political science from MIT in 2007, concentrating in American Politics and Public Policy, and she holds a B.A. in Political Science and Economics from Wesleyan University.
Liam Honigsberg
Liam Honigsberg has a background that includes teaching high school algebra in Arizona, analyzing policy at Achieve in Washington DC, and performing independent research on assessment systems through a Fulbright Grant in Madrid, Spain. Liam completed his undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley, where he published an Honors thesis examining students’ attitudes towards their performance on the California STAR test. He is currently studying graduate statistics at Harvard University.
Program Development
David Jacobson, Ph.D.
A Senior Education Specialist at Cambridge Education, David supports teacher teams in collaboratively improving curriculum, instruction, and assessment. He leads the development of Cambridge Education’s Common Priorities Program, an approach to coherent school-wide instructional improvement that is currently being implemented in schools in NY, NJ, and MA. He writes the blog, commonpriorities.org. David has extensive experience working with hundreds of teachers in a wide variety of school settings to develop effective professional learning communities. David holds a BA and an MA from Brown University and received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago.
Chip Morrison, Ed.D.
Chip has more than 30 years of experience in education—as a teacher, curriculum and software developer, researcher, and teacher trainer. A founding member of the Co-nect design team in 1992, he was the principal architect of Co-nect’s school improvement model and developer of Co-nect’s Critical Friends school visitation program. As a Senior Scientist at Bolt Beranek & Newman, Chip worked on a number of government-funded research projects, including a study of classroom “science talk.” Chip has a B.A. in Drama from Dartmouth College, an M.A. in Applied Linguistics from the University of Hong Kong, and an Ed.D. in Human Development from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Project Management
Renee Chandonnet
Renee Chandonnet spent five years as an elementary school teacher with the Teach for America Corps. In addition to classroom teaching, she created thematic curriculum for the Houston public schools and the state of Texas. Renee created curriculum and provided professional development for a wide variety of after-school programs before coming to Cambridge Education. Renee is a certified PRINCE2 practitioner, and she brings this project management expertise to the Tripod team. Renee is a graduate of Wellesley College, with a B.A. in Architecture and American Studies.
Kevin Hardy
Kevin Hardy serves as a project manager for Cambridge Education and is involved with all phases of operations associated with the delivery of the Tripod Project surveys. He is an integral member of the data team, and in charge of report creation and quality assurance. Kevin is a graduate of Wesleyan University with a double major in Economics and Government. He joined Cambridge Education after working for seven years in the financial markets in Chicago.