In this month’s staff profile, Jim talks about Corona’s late night knitting parties and more.
Jim and Lauren

In addition to an excellent ability for sensing when the Corona Staff require a fresh pot of delicious coffee, Jim brings to our team a joy for research. With his inquisitive mind and passion for building the right methods, Jim is always willing to rack his brain for the perfect approach towards better understanding any given situation. Jim’s background in political science provides him a strong foundation in thinking creatively about complex questions and how Corona may build a more holistic picture of any given situation through combing qualitative and quantitative research approaches. According to Jim,

My favorite work involves asking difficult questions and getting creative with research designs. I love to see how a full story emerges when we come at a problem from different angles and employ multiple methods.

At Corona

Jim started at Corona in the fall of 2018 and was most excited about the purpose driven work he could do while applying his political science skillsets across many subject areas. Jim’s dissertation research at CU Boulder demonstrated how survey collection mode shaped the expression of attitudes toward people, policy preferences, and donating behavior. After having built expertise in data analysis, survey design, and causal inference, successful project work at Corona is driven by the ability to ask the right questions. 

While he is excellently skilled at taming complex dataset and making numbers both visually appealing and approachable, Jim revels in the opportunity to learn new skills and subject matter. In just over one year at Corona, Jim quickly added to his skills in survey development and quantitative data modeling an understanding of strategic planning as well as qualitative data methods. As Jim explained, “I always want to be doing and learning new things – there is no shortage of that here at Corona.” No matter the method he employs, Jim is motivated in his work to understand why people do the things they do by finding and testing theory and conceptual frameworks to help explain it.

To our team, Jim brings an insightful awareness of how institutions, culture, and interests shape our current realities. His favorite projects at Corona are those that make a real difference in people’s lives by helping organizations and programs do what they do even better. Recently, he enjoyed conducting evaluative research to assess the impact of a city ordinance regarding the Fort Collins rental market. Corona employed secondary data analysis, rental market trends, and multiple surveys to compare the City’s housing market to a set of similar cities over time. As a result, the City learned about the effects of the ordinance and the tradeoffs of increased neighborhood quality and higher costs of living. As Corona continues to contribute to purpose driven work, Jim hopes that people know its reputation for being the place to go if you want to have make a significant impact on people’s lives, but don’t necessarily know how to achieve your goal.

Outside of Work

When Jim is not hard at work providing insightful data perspectives, he is likely to be listening to or playing music. Jim loves to read and explore Denver’s food and cultural offerings with his wife, Lauren, a Spanish teacher at East High School.

Charitable Organization

Jim selected GiveWell as his recipient of Corona’s $500 donation. Stay tuned for an upcoming post about GiveWell and why he chose it.

Throughout 2019, to help celebrate our 20th Anniversary, we are profiling our staff and select clients. Click here to view all of our interviews. 

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