Carol A. Pistorino

Dr. Carol Pistorino is vice president and director of quality assurance at DIR. Dr. Pistorino provides project direction, strategic leadership, and quality assurance on DIR projects. For more than 25 years, she has served as principal investigator, project director, or senior researcher on numerous program reviews and evaluations, with an emphasis on education, teen pregnancy prevention, and youth services. She is experienced in the full scope of the project lifecycle, including study design, data collection, analysis, and reporting. Dr. Pistorino has conducted experimental and quasi-experimental evaluations for the U.S. Department of Education (ED), many of which focused on programs that serve disadvantaged youths. She has provided analytic and technical support to Regional Educational Laboratories as they designed and conducted randomized trials of education interventions; served as liaison and data collection coordinator to the multisite evaluation of MTSS-B; led the design work for a national study of middle grades students; and managed DIR’s recruitment of schools and completion of thousands of classroom observations for a study of early childhood language development in Title 1 schools. Dr. Pistorino has experience in directing complex studies that include field and survey components—for example, a study of three teen pregnancy prevention models implemented in nine geographic locations nationwide, across 75 schools and health clinics. Dr. Pistorino is a certified research reviewer for ED’s What Works Clearinghouse. She earned her master’s degree and Ph.D. in applied developmental psychology from the University of Miami.