Roman Ruiz
Roman Ruiz is a postsecondary education researcher at AIR and has a decade of experience in the field of higher education, both as a researcher and practitioner. Currently, Ruiz leads quantitative data analysis tasks for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-sponsored Frontier Set initiative, a multi-year study designed to understand the institutional transformation process as it relates to improving college student outcomes. As a member of AIR’s Education Statistics Services Institute Network team, Dr. Ruiz serves as a survey director for the National Center for Education Statistics' signature postsecondary data collection, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. In addition, he provides content expertise on a range projects within AIR’s postsecondary portfolio, including research on undergraduate STEM education at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), competency-based education programs in postsecondary settings, and federal longitudinal sample studies, among others.
Primarily a quantitative researcher, Dr. Ruiz is adept at working with a variety of data sources (e.g., administrative, sampled, georeferenced, panel) to conduct descriptive, multivariate, and spatial analyses utilizing several software platforms (e.g., Stata, R, GIS). Beyond conducting rigorous analyses, he is skilled at translating findings into myriad written and visual products for academic and broad audiences, including peer-reviewed journal articles (e.g., Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory & Practice), book chapters (e.g., American Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century), reports (e.g., Indicators of Higher Education Equity in the United States), blogs (e.g., Higher Education Today), and data visualizations. Dr. Ruiz is a What Works Clearinghouse certified reviewer in Group Design Standards (Version 4.0).
Prior to joining AIR, Dr. Ruiz was a pre-doctoral researcher at the Penn Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy (AHEAD) at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and has held summer positions with the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences; Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development; and the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education. He began his career in higher education as a student services professional at the University of Arkansas, serving as a college access counselor for low-income and first-generation-to-college students in grades 7-12 (TRIO Talent Search) and later as an academic advisor for undergraduate students within the University’s College of Arts & Sciences.