Adam Shepardson
education policy, public administration, GIS, geospatial information systems, geographic information systems, spatial analysis, data science, statistics, quantitative research, SUNY Albany, education governance, education finance, computational social science, public policy, econometrics, Python, R programming, statistical modeling
Education
Public Admin & Policy
Political Science
Economics & History
Honors & Awards
Welcome to my website! I am a PhD student in Public Administration and Policy at SUNY Albany who specializes in quantitative education policy research.
My research examines the socio-political systems that shape American educational policy, finance, and governance. I apply modern computational social science techniques derived from GIS, statistical analysis, and data engineering to connect theoretical insights with real-world policy challenges. This work combines doctoral-level quantitative training in applied social science with rigorous use of modern innovations in programming, LLMs, computer algorithms, and data structures.
Technical Proficiencies
Programming & Quantitative Analysis: Advanced proficiency in R, Python, and Stata with experience moving projects from raw data collection to finely-tuned results. Key foci include web scraping, spatial statistics and spatial data structures, responsible applications of LLMs for quality research, and gold-standard econometrics, machine learning, and text analysis packages
Geospatial Analysis: GIS tools (across Python, R, ArcGIS) for spatial data management and visualization
Data Engineering: SQL (PostgreSQL), cloud computing (SLURM), managing large-scale datasets (e.g., 75+ million records), Linux systems
Development Tools: Git/GitHub, Visual Studio Code, Cursor, Quarto, Jupyter Notebooks, Command Line Interfaces (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub CLI, and others)
Research Support: Grant writing assistance, reproducible research workflows, data visualization, academic writing
Actively seeking opportunities in academic research, public/private sector management and administration, GIS-focused roles, and data analysis positions. My training links quantitative methods with public administration theory, combining technical expertise with evidence-informed management insights.