Preeya Mbekeani

Preeya Mbekeani is an education policy expert with extensive experience leading rigorous research on policies and programs that shape students’ educational opportunities and outcomes. At AIR, she designs, leads, and disseminates findings from large-scale research and evaluation studies of the effects of education policies and programs. Her areas of expertise include K-12 education policy, the high school to college transition, and racial and income-based inequalities in college enrollment and completion. 

Dr. Mbekeani has deep expertise in a range of quantitative methods, including randomized-controlled trials, quasi-experimental designs, regression analyses, and multi-level and mixed-effects models. She serves as project director for a mixed-methods, quasi-experimental evaluation of a dual enrollment quantitative reasoning course. She has led quantitative analyses for an Institute of Education Sciences-funded study of two interventions aimed at promoting advanced course taking. Using quasi-experimental methods, she examined the effects of district automatic enrollment policies on high school and college outcomes, and the second intervention comprised a large-scale randomized-controlled trial of an automatic notification tool aimed at increasing advanced course taking in high school. 

Dr. Mbekeani conducts much of her research in partnership with state and local education agencies and institutions of higher education. Dr. Mbekeani serves as Arkansas partnership lead for Regional Educational Laboratory Southwest where she oversees technical assistance, applied evaluation, and dissemination projects.

Her research has been published in top-tier peer-reviewed journals including, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Sociology of Education, and the American Educational Research Journal. Dr. Mbekeani presents regularly at national conferences and writes for non-academic audiences. 

Prior to joining AIR, Dr. Mbekeani was a postdoctoral research associate with the Educational Opportunity in Massachusetts Research-Practice Partnership at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University. In this role, she studied high schools’ effects on students longer-run education and employment outcomes, the effects of high-stakes high-school testing, and the educational experiences and outcomes of immigrant newcomers to Massachusetts high schools. She began her career as a high school teacher.