Megan Rauch Griffard, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Educational Policy and Leadership program and the associate faculty director of the Center for Research, Evaluation, and Assessment. Her research focuses on educational policy analysis, program evaluation, and data-driven decision-making, with particular attention to K–12 public school finance and disruptions to schooling at both the systemic and individual levels. These include crises such as climate disasters, the COVID-19 pandemic, and student hospitalizations.

Griffard’s empirical work has been published in leading journals, including Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis and AERA Open. Her work has been supported by the Nevada Department of Education, the Institute of Education Sciences, and EdFund. A national award-winning mixed methods researcher, her methodological scholarship appears in The Journal of Mixed Methods Research, the premier journal in the field.

She earned her Ph.D. in education with a specialization in policy, leadership, and school improvement from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She holds master’s degrees from Northwestern University and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, as well as a bachelor’s degree from Boston College. Her commitment to improving education through research is grounded in her early experiences as a Teach For America corps member in the Clark County School District and as a policy analyst with Nevada’s Guinn Center for Policy Priorities.