Erica was a doctoral candidate in Education Policy and fellow in the Stanford Interdisciplinary Doctoral Training Program in Quantitative Education Policy Analysis. Her research currently focuses on the politics of universal preschool policies and their implications for educational inequality. She explores these issues using unique national public opinion data, spatial analysis (GIS), and synthetic control methodologies. Before beginning her doctoral studies, she served as research assistant to Sharon Lynn Kagan at the National Center for Children and Families at Teachers College, Columbia University. She also taught pre-kindergarten at KIPP DC: LEAP Academy and interned in the Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development at the U.S. Department of Education. She graduated from Yale University in 2006 with a B.A. in History and Linguistics and earned a M.A. in Political Science from Stanford in 2013.