I am a doctoral student in Educational Policy Studies at Wheelock College of Education & Human Development, Boston University, and a research assistant at the Wheelock Educational Policy Center (WEPC). I will be on the job market in 2026–27.
My research examines how structural features of education systems create or reduce barriers to opportunity for students and educators, with a focus on entry and transitions: who enters a profession or a stage of schooling, who stays or moves on, and under what conditions. I combine causal inference and computational methods, using quasi-experimental designs to estimate policy effects and natural language processing, including large language models, for large-scale text analysis, drawing on research-practice partnerships with state and district agencies as well as large public datasets.
My dissertation, Three Studies on Barriers to Opportunity in Public Education Systems, follows this agenda across educators and students at different points in the K-12 system. The first paper applies large language models, validated by researchers at each stage, to teacher induction narratives to identify challenges beginning teachers face and how those challenges shape early-career retention. The second uses a regression discontinuity design to evaluate a state certification policy allowing candidates who narrowly miss a licensure exam to earn certification through a targeted professional learning module. The third turns to the student side of the system, testing whether students exiting English learner services are ready to succeed without support, using fixed effects, difference-in-differences, and regression discontinuity designs to distinguish effects for the broader reclassified population from effects at the eligibility margin. Beyond the dissertation, I also study early childhood education.
I have a B.A. in management from Nanjing University and an M.A. in economics and education from Columbia University. Prior to starting my Ph.D., I was a senior research assistant at Peking University.
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Email: mdma@bu.edu
Bluesky: @mingyanma.bsky.social
Mingyan Ma 