Postdoctoral Fellows
CREO's postdoctoral program provides rigorous training and research experiences for recent Ph.D. recipients. This program strengthens CREO's research capabilities, establishes the Institute for Educational Initiatives as a training center in the educational research, and further integrates Notre Dame's teaching and research mission.
Steven Alvarado, Ph.D., CREO Postdoctoral Research Associate
Steven Alvarado’s interests include social stratification, quantitative methods, education, and health with a particular focus on immigrants and the children of immigrants in the United States. One line of his research focuses on unpacking how social contexts impact youth outcomes. For example, he has previously examined how friendships, especially college-oriented friendships, affect college application patterns among White and Latino youth (Alvarado and Lopez-Turley 2012). In his dissertation, Steven analyzed the effect that neighborhood social context has on math scores, reading scores, and obesity among urban minority youth. In a separate line of research, Steven has examined the role of violence in Latin America as a catalyst for emigration to the United States (Alvarado and Massey 2010). Current projects focus on the participation of Latino students in STEM (i.e., science, technology, engineering, and math) tracks in U.S. high schools and on the links between early health disparities and inequalities in educational and occupational attainment in adulthood. Steven is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Research on Educational Opportunity at the University of Notre Dame.
R. Joseph Waddington, Ph.D., IEI Postdoctoral Research Associate
R. Joseph Waddington’s research interests include school choice, quantitative methods, and education policy, with a particular focus on K-12 Catholic and charter schools in the United States. In his dissertation, he studied the effect of charter schools on urban K-8 Catholic school enrollments and closures in ten large cities throughout the Great Lakes region of the United States. He is a co-recipient of the 2013 Outstanding Dissertation Award for the AERA Catholic Education Special Interest Group. He has also examined school choice and government funding structures for private schools in countries other than the United States. In a separate line of research, Joseph works with the USE Lab at the University of Michigan to develop predictive models and displays for an early warning system used by a mentoring program for at-risk undergraduate students. Current projects focus on how the growing numbers of school choice programs influence the demographic, socioeconomic, and academic compositions of students enrolled in urban schools. He is particularly interested the factors considered by parents when making school choices with special attention to minorities and socioeconomically disadvantaged families. Joseph is currently a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Research on Educational Opportunity and the Institute for Education Initiatives at the University of Notre Dame studying K-12 parental school choice and Catholic schools in the State of Indiana.
