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May 2013


Staff News

Erin Higgins

Erin Higgins is an associate research scientist in NCER's Teaching and Learning Division, where she will oversee the Cognition and Student Learning program. Erin earned her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology at the University of Illinois, where her research focused on how different learning tasks such as making comparisons, making inferences, or classifying instances into different categories affect the degree to which learners retain information and generalize what they have learned. Erin comes to IES from TASC, Inc., where she was a human factors engineer working on-site with the Human Factors Laboratory of the Federal Aviation Administration in Atlantic City, NJ. In this role, she developed, tested and evaluated future concepts and software improvements proposed for air traffic controllers and pilots.

Pamela Tripp-Melby

Pamela Tripp-Melby was recently named the Director of the National Library of Education (NLE) at the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance. She will oversee the strategic direction of the library, which provides commercial electronic and print research collections and services to the Department of Education, and the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC), an internet-based digital library of education research and information. As Director of the NLE, Pamela is committed to making the library's resources and those in ERIC form a more cohesive source for research support.

Before joining the Department, Pamela was Division Chief for the Information Services Division at the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In that capacity, she managed the Joint Bank-Fund Library and the delivery of commercial electronic data and information to the World Bank and the IMF, as well as being responsible for the IMF's archives and records management program. Previous to her work at the IMF, Pamela managed special libraries at the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Paris, France. Pamela holds a M.S. in library science from Columbia.