Principal Investigators
Sara Anderson, PhD, MA
Senior Research Scientist, Child Trends
Sara Anderson is a senior research scientist in early childhood at Child Trends. Her research aims to improve the lives of children and families through applied policy research. For ten years, she has been conducting research on contexts (neighborhoods and schools) and policies (pre-K and child care) that support children from diverse backgrounds. Her work has appeared in many peer-reviewed journals including Child Development and the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.
Dr. Anderson is a Fellow of the Robert Wood Johnson Interdisciplinary Research Leadership program (2019-2021) and co-leads a community-based participatory research project on school-based health centers in rural West Virginia. She also is a co-principal investigator on the high school follow-up of the Tulsa, OK pre-K program, one of the longest-running studies of a school-based pre-K program. Dr. Anderson has expertise in quasi-experimental methods, latent class analyses, and growth modeling.
Much of her current work focuses on early childhood programs (such as home visiting and child care) in rural areas of the US. Children and families living in rural contexts face additional challenges related to living in rural, isolated contexts, and Dr. Anderson aims to understand the factors of these contexts that may impede early childhood programs and services.
Kelli Caseman, MA
Executive Director, Think Kids
Kelli Caseman is both the Executive Director and a founding member of Think Kids. She began working in the nonprofit sector in 1999, advocating for public education, then for kids’ health issues since 2004. Most recently, she served as the Executive Director of the West Virginia School-Based Health Assembly, and as the Director of Child Health for West Virginians for Affordable Health Care.
She is a fellow of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Interdisciplinary Research Leaders program, studying the linkages between health care and public education in rural West Virginia with researchers from Penn State University and Child Trends. More on Team West Virginia can be found on the IRL website.
Kelli is a vocal advocate for kids’ health in our state and is published frequently in statewide media. In 2019, she received the West Virginia Chapter, American Academy of Pediatrics’ Friend of Children Advocacy Award. She presents on the national and state levels to a variety of organizations about the health care needs of West Virginia’s kids.
Simon Haeder, PhD, MPA
Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Penn State University
Simon F. Haeder is an assistant professor of public policy with the Penn State School of Public Policy. Prior to joining, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science in the John D. Rockefeller IV School of Policy & Politics at West Virginia University. His teaching and research interests include the public policymaking process, regulatory politics, lobbying and interest group politics, and healthcare policy.
Recent work has focused on such issues like implementing the Affordable Care Act, provider networks, and regulatory policymaking at the Office of Management and Budget. This work has been published in the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Public Administration Research and Practice, Public Administration Review, Health Affairs, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law.
Haeder is currently working on several health policy projects focusing on provider networks, the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the role of expertise in the policymaking process, the opioid epidemic, high-risk insurance pools, as well as several projects investigating regulatory politics at the president’s Office of Management and Budget and the Department of the Interior.