Alderson is currently the data manager for the Get Ready Guilford Initiative, which is a county-wide initiative to improve outcomes for children in Guilford, North Carolina. She is also the data manager for ExCEL P-3, which examines whether a preschool program, reinforced by a system-wide alignment of instruction into elementary school, has impacts on a range of skills through third grade. She plays a lead role in acquiring, processing, and analyzing data from a variety of sources and has several years of experience analyzing data from random assignment studies of programs for low-income families. Previously, Alderson was the data manager for the Mother and Infant Home Visiting Program Evaluation (MIHOPE), a large-scale evaluation of the effectiveness of home visiting programs, as well as the data manager for the Supporting Healthy Marriage Project, an evaluation of marriage-education programs targeting low-income, racially and ethnically diverse married couples. She was also the data manager and lead analyst for the Next Generation project, which examined how welfare and antipoverty programs affected child well-being. Alderson has presented work at the conferences of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, the National Association for Welfare Research and Statistics, and the NorthEast Statistical Analysis System (SAS) Users Group. She had her start in public policy research as a research assistant at the Urban Institute. She holds a BA from Tufts University and a master's degree from Brown University.
