Provides services and technical assistance for students so they benefit from research-based curricula taught in safe environments.

Produces and disseminates information to provide motivation and tools to enable individuals to make informed decisions about health issues.

Develops and implements education testing programs that benefit students, parents and public officals.

Works with the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the government's primary source for collecting and analyzing data about public education.

Helps to provide all children with access to a quality education, and empowers people, organizations, and communities to bring about social change.

Is committed to helping clients improve the effectiveness of their workforce through a wide range of management, organizational, and business improvement efforts.

Produces, maintains and disseminates systematic reviews of the effects of social and behavioral interventions.

Kristin L. Carman, Ph.D.

Principal Research Scientist

Kristin L. Carman, Ph.D., joined AIR in 2001. Dr. Carman’s work includes leading a team of health services research professionals, managing projects and overseeing technical performance, developing research proposals for public and private clients, and ensuring the professional development of health services staff members.

Dr. Carman’s areas of expertise include health care quality, access, and financing, health-related communications, and consumer engagement. Her work developing and evaluating written materials for use by consumers, purchasers, and health care providers includes a particular emphasis on explaining evidence-based information. Dr. Carman is well regarded for her work assessing the performance of health care organizations and determining how best to enable improvement in organizational performance. In addition, Dr. Carman is a nationally known expert on reporting health care quality information and the development and testing of effective data displays (paper and Web-based).

Dr. Carman’s methodological expertise encompasses the collection and analysis of qualitative (focus groups, interviews, cases studies) and quantitative data, questionnaire development, and evaluation research. She currently directs several large government and foundation funded grants and contracts, including a groundbreaking project for the California Healthcare Foundation to create a Communication Toolkit to help employers educate employees about evidence-based health care. Dr. Carman also is a Co-Principal Investigator on the Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research (AHRQ) project known as Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS II) to design and evaluate consumer-reported measures of health plan and provider performance.

Dr. Carman also leads a project for AHRQ with Geisenger to improve efficiency, quality, safety, and patient-centered care by redesigning the physician-patient interaction during the rheumatology office visit. She is also Deputy Director for a project for AHRQ and DoD to build a national support network for the implementation of TeamSTEPPSTM. TeamSTEPPS is an evidence-based teamwork system developed by AIR aimed at optimizing patient outcomes by improving communication and other teamwork skills among healthcare professionals.

Prior to joining AIR, Dr. Carman worked at RTI International, where she conducted studies on the assessment of health plans and reporting of quality information, and led evaluations of these efforts. She received her PhD from Northwestern University, and worked as a Legislative Analyst for the Illinois General Assembly for many years before entering graduate school.