For Immediate Release: July 2005

Dr. Adam Bickford has joined Optimal Solutions Group LLC (Optimal) as a Senior Research Associate. Dr. Bickford brings 12 years experience conducting all aspects of program evaluation and institutional research in K-12 education and the arts to Optimal. His prior research activities include analyzing standardized test data, designing sample surveys and analyzing the derived data, conducting focus groups, and conducting observational studies. He has reported results to a large variety of audiences, from school district personnel to national meetings. Dr. Bickford is currently a co-PI on a NSF-funded evaluation of Alternative Teacher Certification Programs in Missouri. In his previous position, Dr. Bickford led the evaluation team for eMINTS. The eMINTS evaluation work had been cited by the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA) in its National Leadership Institute Toolkit.

Dr. Bickford has wide experience programming in SAS/STAT and SAS MACRO in the PC and Unix environments. He has developed a handheld database/data collection system using embedded Visual Basic, Excel, and Access. He is fluent in Visual Basic for Applications, SQL and Awk.

Dr. Bickford earned a B.A. in Sociology from the University of California and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago.

Optimal Solutions Group, LLC, is a minority-owned economic and policy analysis consulting firm in the Baltimore-Annapolis-Washington, DC area. We are committed to supplying insightful program evaluation, cost-benefit and effectiveness analyses, custom econometric modeling, and market analyses for decisionmakers in both the public and private sectors.

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OPTIMAL has served the needs of numerous governmental and commercial clients, including federal and state agencies, community-based organizations, business associations, and law firms.

For more information, contact Mark Turner, 443.451.7060 or mturner@optimalsolutionsgroup.com.