Provides research, evaluation, consulting, and technical assistance services that contribute to the lifelong process of learning and improving personal performance.

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.

Darren Woodruff, Ph.D.

Principal Research Analyst

Dr. Darren Woodruff is a Principal Research Analyst at the American Institutes for Research. He has worked on issues related to special education, at-risk youth, school climate, and school reform for over ten years.

At AIR, Dr. Woodruff is currently Associate Director for the National Center for Mental Health Promotion and Youth Violence Prevention, providing technical assistance to 160 Safe Schools/Healthy Students, Youth Violence Prevention, and Targeted Capacity Expansion grantees across the country. He is also Project Director for the evaluation of the Ohio High Schools Transformation Initiative, a state-wide reform initiative supported by the KnowledgeWorks and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations. Prior to this work, Dr. Woodruff served as technical assistance coordinator for the Elementary and Middle Schools Technical Assistance Center, consulting with state and local departments of education and providing training to school districts on such topics as effective behavioral supports, violence prevention, disproportionality and accessing the general education curriculum. With AIR’s Center for Effective Collaboration and Practice, Dr. Woodruff was lead author for the monograph, The Role of Education in a System of Care: Effectively Serving Children with Emotional or Behavioral Disorders and a contributing author to An Educators’ Guide to Schoolwide Reform. More recently, Dr. Woodruff was co-author for a chapter in the Harvard Civil Rights Project report on Minority Issues in Special Education, and a presenter on this topic at the U.S. Department of Education’s “Improving America’s Schools” conference.