Meet the Speakers

Dr. Emily Hanno is a research associate in the Families and Children policy area at MDRC, where her research focuses on understanding how early education and care programs and policies support children, families, and communities. At MDRC, Hanno leads the Measures for Early Success Initiative and the Research-Practice Partnership with Acelero Learning, Inc. Before joining MDRC in 2022, Hanno was a postdoctoral research fellow with the Saul Zaentz Early Education Initiative at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she helped lead research efforts on the Early Learning Study at Harvard, a longitudinal, population-based study of young children across Massachusetts. Before undertaking her doctoral studies, Hanno was a Head Start educator and then an instructional coach for teachers in preschool through fifth-grade classrooms in Houston, Texas. Hanno holds a B.A. in economics and international relations from Tufts University, an Ed.M. in human development and psychology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a Ph.D. in education policy and program evaluation from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Dr. Audrey Kittredge is a Senior Learning Scientist at Duolingo. She has a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2012). Prior to joining Duolingo in 2021, she held positions as a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon and Cambridge Universities, and consulted with UNICEF on early childhood development programs. Her academic research focused primarily on implicit language learning in adults, exploration-based learning in early childhood, and teaching approaches to support children's self-directed learning. At Duolingo, her work has focused on efficacy research, product development, and communication for the Duolingo ABC early literacy app and the Duolingo language learning app.