• ABOUT US
• R&D DIVISIONS
• CAREERS
• NEWSROOM
• CONTACT US
• HOME

Kathryn Valdes

Program Manager, Data Services

Kathryn Valdés is the Manager of the Data Services Program, which supports studies and evaluations conducted by the Center for Education and Human Services as well as by other Centers in the Policy Division.

Ms. Valdés has more than 25 years of experience in developing, maintaining, documenting, and using complex original and extant databases in MVS, CMS, DOS, and PC environments. She has written programs in FORTRAN, Pascal, BASIC, dBASE and has used SAS, SPSS, and SUDAAN for database construction, maintenance, and statistical programming. She has written several programs using the SQL and the SAS macro language and developed a system of automated programs to produce large numbers of production-ready tables in either HTML or print format.

Ms. Valdés has designed and maintained complex databases for various studies, including the Center’s portfolio of national longitudinal studies of children and youth with disabilities. The studies collected data repeatedly from several sources, including parents, children and youth, school staff, and school and service records. For the evaluation of California’s comprehensive, integrated, school-linked services initiative (Healthy Start), she managed case management data for families, service data for individuals, student school record data, and site-level data from collaborative members and schools. She has published multiple database documentation manuals for a wide range of studies, and for the Healthy Start evaluation, she wrote several reports merging data produced by SAS and exported data for use by the local initiatives. Ms. Valdés has helped devise seminar materials and provides instruction in analyses of longitudinal databases developed for the U.S. Department of Education.

Ms. Valdés has presented several papers at the regional SAS Software Users’ conference and in 2004 was awarded best contributed paper in the Data Warehousing and Database Management section. In 2008 she was an invited speaker in the Tutorials Section and Section Chair for the Applications Development Section.