Chris Thorn

Christopher A. Thorn, Ph.D.
Associate Scientist &
Director of Technical Services, WCER

1025 W. Johnson St., Room 370
Madison, WI 53706
Direct: (608)263-2709
Office: (608)263-4333
Fax: (608)265-9300
Email: cathorn@wisc.edu



Chris Thorn on the Woetersee in Austria

Curriculum Vita

Chris Thorn's profile on linked in.

 

I am currently engaged in two different research projects. I am evaluating the Chicago Community Trust's Education Initiative. I am also one of the project leaders in the Value Added Research Center and the Project Director of our work with Vanderbilt University to provide techical assistance to recipients of the U.S. Department of Education Teacher Incentive Fund Grants. VARC is also engaged in research with Milwaukee and Chicago Public Schools to develop and extend value-added models for accountability, evaluation, and school improvement.

I am also the Director of Technical Services here at WCER. I've worked on over a dozen different research projects over the past decade - including the development of software for the qualitative analysis of large-scale video collections, building and testing training materials for school-level data use, and deploying enterprise collaboration tools for a project spanning all 4 time zones in the U.S.

I began doing education research with John Witte of the Political Science department here at UW-Madison in 1991. I managed the Milwaukee Parental Choice Voucher Study for him for five years. During that time, I also completed my Doctor of Sociology at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. My dissertation and post-doc work was on private-private and public-private cooperation in R&D. The particular focus of the project was on cooperation efforts between traditionally antagonistic partners. The theoretical framework for this project was based on theories of complex systems and was an attempt to identify successful outcomes from occurrences of what the German Sociologist Renate Mayntz calls "antagonistic cooperation."

When not doing something with socio-technical systems, I am involved with vocal music. I am on the board of and the webmaster for the Wisconsin Children's Choir.

  

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