Graduate Student Association (GSA)

Lindsey Insco holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from Xavier University (2022) and a Master of Science in Criminal Justice from the University of Cincinnati (2023). Lindsey is currently a doctoral student in Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati. Her research examines life-course patterns of offending, drug overdose trends and response efforts, and broader characteristics of terrorism and counterterrorism. 

Esnart is an international doctoral student in the college of education.  Her program concentration is  education community-based action research. Her research interests revolve around the intersection of early childhood education, emergency education, and the rights of girls.

Amota Ataneka Merang is a doctoral candidate in Quantitative Research Methodologies. His research focuses on developing and applying quantitative methods for causal inference, particularly in settings where important variables are not directly observed but are measured through tests, surveys, or questionnaires. These include constructs such as achievement, burnout, motivation, depression, self-efficacy, trust, belonging, and quality of life. His dissertation brings together ideas from psychometrics, causal inference, and machine learning to develop methods that account for measurement error while allowing for nonlinear relationships, interactions, and other complexities in the data.

His dissertation is supported by the National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, and paper that provides part of the methodological foundation for this work has been accepted for publication pending minor revisions at Psychological Methods (July 2026). Amota is currently extending his methodological work to item response theory (IRT), developing a data-adaptive framework for estimating causal effects when variables are measured using binary or categorical test and survey items.

A second area of his research focuses on the design of studies examining treatment effects, mediation, and moderation effects in multilevel and multisite settings. His work in this area considers questions such as how many participants, clusters, or sites are needed to detect effects with adequate statistical power. This includes developing methods for study planning under clustering and mediation, as well as estimating design parameters from large-scale datasets that researchers can use when planning future studies.

Amota is also contributing a chapter on cluster randomized trials to the Oxford Handbook of Impact Evaluation. He presents his research at conferences including the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Modern Modeling Methods (M3), the American Evaluation Association (AEA), and the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE).

Catherine is a doctoral student in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Psychology (2016) and a Master’s in Applied Behavioral Science with a concentration in criminal justice (2020) from Wright State University. Her research interests lie in corrections specifically focusing on offender rehabilitation, prisoner reentry, in-prison programming, and specialty courts.

Tiffany is a highly motivated and experienced educator passionate about early childhood education. She is currently a doctoral student in Educational Studies at the University of Cincinnati, where she is concentrating in Curriculum Studies and Teacher Education. Tiffany holds undergraduate degrees in Early Childhood and Inclusive Early Childhood Education and a master's degree in Curriculum & Instruction with a focus on STEM Learning. Her research interests include mathematics and science education, STEM/STEAM learning, and play-based learning.