Rob is a senior fellow in the Education and Child Development department at NORC.

Prior to joining NORC in 2024, Rob was a research professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and prior to that, an assistant professor at the Harris School at the University of Chicago. He founded and directed the Value-Added Research Center at UW-Madison where he pioneered the use and delivery of high-quality analytics and tools to support American educational systems. In collaboration with university colleagues, he founded and served as CEO and president of Education Analytics, a non-profit organization designed to scale the delivery of educational statistics nationwide.

Rob is known for his research on and implementation of value-added growth models and school accountability metrics, human capital analytics, equity-aligned early warning systems, analytics for rural education, measurement of social emotional learning competencies, and program evaluation. He is currently working on using AI agents. Rob developed major research partnerships with many school districts, including Atlanta, Chicago, Hillsborough County, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New York City, and Tulsa; states, including Delaware, Minnesota, New York, South Carolina, and Wisconsin; and regional collaboratives, including CORE and associated California School Districts. Rob has a long history of providing technical assistance for district, state, and federal education initiatives.

Rob was a first-round recipient of a Senior Urban Education Research Fellowship from the Council of Great City Schools, received the UW-Madison Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research, was named a Moneyball for Government Non-Profit All-Star by Results for America, and was selected into Edu Dream's K12 Research for Equity Hub.