Social Science Careers Beyond the Academy

Stacey S. Merola, Ph.D., is a Principal Investigator at Guidehouse, Inc. where she is providing leadership on a portfolio of large, mixed-methods evaluations. Dr. Merola is a multiple award-winning evaluator with more than 25 years of social science research experience and over 20 years of experience in program evaluation, as both a manager and an analyst. Over the course of her career, Dr. Merola has worked with a diverse cross section of clientele representing government, corporations, and nonprofits to understand the effectiveness of their programs. She has worked at large consulting firms and small consulting firms, and owned her own successful small business for eight years. John H. Hitchcock, Ph.D. (University at Albany, State University of New York), is a Principal Research Scientist at Westat, where he conducts grant-funded and contract-based research for government agencies and philanthropies. He focuses on evaluating interventions in K–12 education and he writes about mixed methods research and other types of research designs. To date he co-authored more than 70 works that have been collectively cited more than 6,000 times and he presented at professional conferences more than 150 times. He worked as a tenured faculty member at two different universities. Mercedes Rubio, Ph.D., is Program Director in the Division of Training, Workforce Development, and Diversity, where she handles the National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN) of the NIH Common Fund Enhancing the Diversity of the NIH-funded Workforce Initiative, the Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Awards (IRACDA), the Bridges to the Baccalaureate, Innovative Programs to Enhance Research Training (IPERT), and the Research to Understand and Inform Interventions that Promote the Research Careers of Students in Biomedical and Behavioral Sciences portfolios. She also will serve in the role of program officer in the NIGMS Postdoctoral Research Associate (PRAT) Program. Before joining NIGMS, Rubio was chief of the Psychopathology Risk and Protective Factors Research Program at the National Institute of Mental Health and was assistant director of that Institute’s Individual Research Fellowship Program. Rubio earned a B.A. in sociology from California State University, Bakersfield, and a Ph.D. in medical sociology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she also completed postdoctoral training in nursing in the area of HIV intervention and health disparities.