Martha Abele Mac Iver, Ph.D. has been a Research Scientist at the Center for Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins University since 1998.

A political scientist who made the transition into educational policy research after more than a decade of research on both the Northern Ireland conflict and the political transformation of Europe after 1989, Associate Professor Martha Abele Mac Iver has focused her recent research on early-warning indicators and the effectiveness of numerous school and district educational interventions designed to improve student achievement. She is currently leading two IES-funded studies, one to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of professional development equipping high school teachers to increase student motivation in order to successfully earn all required course credits, and the other on continuous improvement of family engagement efforts focused on improving student outcomes in the transition to high school. She is also collaborating on an IES-funded efficacy study of an intervention for ninth graders in 41 high schools.

From 2012 – 2015 she led a three-year external evaluation for an Investment in Innovations (i3) development project (summer school STEM program). She also led a study helping several Colorado districts understand the behavioral characteristics of their dropout populations in 2008-09, and held a senior urban research fellowship (2009 – 2011) from the Council of the Great City Schools to study dropout predictors in Baltimore.

From 2004 – 2007 she was a co-investigator on a National Science Foundation-funded study of the achievement effects of a decade of educational reforms in Philadelphia. She has also studied educational reform efforts in the Baltimore City public schools for the past two decades, and is a researcher with the Baltimore Education Research Consortium.  She is associate editor of the Journal of Education for Students Placed At Risk (JESPAR).

Her articles and reports have focused on early warning indicators of dropout, as well as on the effectiveness of school and district educational interventions designed to improve student achievement (including comprehensive school reform efforts, university-school partnerships, dropout prevention/college readiness high school programs, after-school and summer programs, educational privatization, alternative certification, and other interventions). She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan.