Elizabeth Tipton is Professor of Statistics and Data Science at Northwestern University and a Faculty Fellow in the Institute for Policy Research. Her research is on the design of studies — how to build experiments and evidence bases when treatment effects vary and the units in a study are not the only ones a decision will affect. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Education and a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the American Educational Research Association.

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Elizabeth Tipton is Professor of Statistics and Data Science at Northwestern University, Professor (by courtesy) in the School of Education and Social Policy, and a Faculty Fellow in the Institute for Policy Research. She received her PhD in Statistics from Northwestern in 2011 and was on the faculty at Teachers College, Columbia University from 2011 to 2018.

Her research concerns the design of studies, and of the evidence systems they add up to. It begins from two premises — that treatment effects vary - so heterogeneity is the estimand rather than a nuisance parameter - and that the units in a study are rarely the only ones a decision will affect - so generalization is as much a recruitment problem as it is an estimation problem. This work spans robust variance estimation and meta-regression, methods for generalizing from randomized trials to target populations, the design of experiments to predict unit-specific effects, and the design of evidence systems themselves.

She is the author, with Larry Hedges, of Designing Small Evaluation Studies (Sage, 2025), and co-creator of The Generalizer, a tool for planning recruitment in randomized trials. Her methodological work has appeared in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Psychological Methods, and the Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics; her substantive collaborations have appeared in Nature, PNAS, and Nature Human Behaviour.

She is an elected member of the National Academy of Education, and a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the American Educational Research Association. She has served as President of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness and Chair of the Social Statistics Section of the American Statistical Association, and was a member of the National Academies committee on The Future of Education Research at IES.

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Elizabeth Tipton develops methods for designing studies and for building evidence that decision-makers can use.

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