Our Team

[Brief intro about the founding team and what brings them together.]

Tamara Arnold

Co-founder and Chief Boss Lady

Tamara Arnold is an economist and education policy researcher with extensive experience at the World Bank Education Global Practice. Her work focuses on early childhood development, skills measurement, and education quality in low- and middle-income countries.

Tamara holds a Master of Public Policy from the University of Chicago, with concentrations in program evaluation, microeconometrics, and education policy. She has led and contributed to research in Bangladesh, Serbia, Ghana, Chile, and Central Asia, with a focus on caregiving quality, parenting programs, and child development outcomes.

[Additional background, personal note, or description of role at Paideia can go here.]

Jonathan Seiden

Co-founder and Chief Research Dude

Jonathan Seiden is an Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Policy at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College of Education and Human Development. His research sits at the intersection of early childhood development, psychometrics, and causal inference, with a focus on international and cross-cultural contexts.

Jonathan holds a Ph.D. in Education Policy and Program Evaluation from Harvard University. He has worked with the World Bank, Save the Children, and the WHO on large-scale measurement initiatives spanning more than a dozen countries, including co-developing the Caregiver Reported Early Development Instruments (CREDI) and contributing to the WHO's Global Scales for Early Development (GSED).

[Additional background, personal note, or description of role at Paideia can go here.]

Saori Iwamoto

Senior Nerd and Quantitative Evaluation Lead

Saori Iwamoto is a senior quantitative researcher with over 10 years of experience in measurement, data analysis, research design, and advanced statistical methods. She has led and contributed to rigorous program evaluations and impact assessments across education, early childhood development, and international development, working with organizations including FHI 360, Save the Children, and the World Bank.

Saori holds a Master of International Development Policy from Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy. She has managed research projects spanning Laos, Thailand, Nepal, Rwanda, Zambia, Tanzania, Cambodia, and beyond, with deep expertise in quasi-experimental methods, structural equation modeling, multilevel modeling, and data visualization. She is a strong coder in Stata and R, and is fluent in Japanese, English, Spanish, and Kyrgyz.

[Additional background, personal note, or description of role at Paideia can go here.]