Jill Bowdon

Jill Bowdon, Ph.D., is a principal researcher at AIR, as well as AIR's Literacy Practice Hub lead. Dr. Bowdon’s content expertise lies in literacy instruction, state literacy policies and practices, and the science of reading. Through her work, she has honed her skills of deeply engaging with practitioners and policymakers to shape research and technical assistance that is rigorous, accessible, and actionable.

During her career, Dr. Bowdon has served as the principal investigator, project director, and lead analyst on ten large-scale research studies funded by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Science Foundation. Her work includes leadership positions on 5 NCEE contracts, including over 7 years of work on Regional Educational Laboratory as a researcher and partnership lead. She is a certified reviewer for the What Works Clearinghouse for the Group Design Standards Version 5.0. Dr. Bowdon has extensive training in statistical methods appropriate for making causal inferences, including experimental design and quasi-experimental methods. She is experienced in leading analyses of data from administrative records, surveys, classroom observations, and interviews.

Prior to joining AIR in 2015, Dr. Bowdon was an Institute of Education Sciences (IES) postdoctoral training fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her Ph.D. from the sociology department at University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was also an IES pre-doctoral training fellow. Dr. Bowdon is the recipient of a Jack Kent Cooke dissertation fellowship and an Institute for Research on Poverty dissertation fellowship. She started her career as a fourth-grade teacher.