Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations
Jennifer D. Timmer, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral research fellow at Vanderbilt University. Her background is in the use of quantitative methods to examine issues of equity in education and policies and programs aimed at improving outcomes for historically underserved students. In her postdoctoral fellowship, she has expanded this work to look specifically at equity in education leadership, studying representation, access, and compensation in the principalship and superintendency. In some of her current projects, she examines gender disparities in principal salaries, how pathways to the superintendency differ by race and gender, and the “glass cliff” phenomenon of hiring women into precarious leadership positions.
Dr. Timmer completed her doctorate in educational psychology with a specialization in quantitative methods at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, with Drs. Joseph (Robinson) Cimpian and Katherine Ryan. Previously, she was the Associate Director for Student Learning at the Academic Center for Student-Athletes at Louisiana State University. Her research has been funded by the American Educational Research Association and the Institute of Education Sciences.