Director of Research
Alaina E. Boyle is an applied educational researcher and the questions that inspire her center on understanding the ways parents and schools promote achievement and positive socioemotional development in students of color and students from low-income household. Alaina earned her doctorate and master’s in human development and family sciences from the University of Texas at Austin, her master’s in psychology from East Carolina University, and her bachelor’s in psychology and economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Alaina is an alumnus of the Institute for Educational Learnership’s Educational Policy Fellowship Program (2021-2022 Michigan cohort).
Most recently, Alaina worked at the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), where she led a variety of quantitative and qualitative data-focused projects to assess systemic social and emotional learning strategies. She supported the Bill and Melinda Gates-funded National Implementation Study, an ongoing nationwide survey of American educators’ SEL implementation and equitable learning practices. Prior to working at CASEL, Alaina coordinated a National Science Foundation project at the University of Texas at Austin exploring how various aspects of the school context influence adolescents’ healthy development as they transition from middle school into high school, with a special emphasis on promoting diverse students’ STEM trajectories.
Alaina is passionate about learning how to harness the power of students’ and families’ assets and translate those into short-and long-term wins. She also believes strongly that a solid foundation in secondary school sets the stage for engaged, productive citizen scholars, and that is why she was drawn to EOS. EOS’s innovative approach to support the academic excellence of students of color and students from low- income households will have profound, lifelong impacts and she is excited be a part of this important work.
