Aaron Schroeder
Research Associate Professor
[email protected]
434-243-7335
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Dr. Schroeder's overarching research focus is the enablement of Evidence-Based Policy-Making and Program Evaluation through the secure liberation, integration, and analysis of administrative and other available data.

Recent work advances this mission through auditable multi-agent LLM pipelines — applying structured-debate agent architectures and explicit provenance chains to produce policy-grade datasets where authoritative ground truth is partial. Active applications include critical-materials supply-chain dependency networks (STDN), open-source defense budget intelligence (IBES), and federal statistical data production; work supported by NSF (NCSES Green Innovation), the Army Research Institute, and Social Data Commons infrastructure. Methodological contributions include privacy-preserving local model deployment and NLP-driven compression of the data science pipeline.

Prior to AI-based methods, this work applied data integration and linkage approaches to education, health, social service, and non-profit administrative data streams to support policy analyses and program evaluations across pre-K services, child care, K-12 and adult education, state workforce training, and U.S. veteran services.

 

Grants Received

Since beginning his research career at Virginia Tech, Dr. Schroeder has served as Principal Investigator or Senior Personnel on over $10M of research with funding from the federal government (National Science Foundation, U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Department of Transportation, U.S. Department of Agriculture), state government (Virginia Department of Social Services, Virginia Department of Education, Virginia State Police, Virginia Department of Emergency Services, Virginia Department of Transportation, Virginia Department of Veteran Services), foundations (Generations United, MetLife Foundation, Virginia Early Childhood Foundation), and the private sector (Shenandoah Telecommunications Corporation).

Research Projects

Pre-AI data integration projects:

AI-era agentic data production:

  • Supply-chain Technology Dependency Networks (STDN) — multi-agent extraction of critical-materials dependency graphs from unstructured federal and scientific sources
  • Intelligence Budget Estimation System (IBES) — agentic reconciliation of open-source DoD budget exhibits
  • Social Data Commons — FAIR-metadata pipelines for social indicator data production and federal statistical supplementation
Research Interests

Policy Analytics; Evidence-Based Policy-Making; Program Evaluation; Data Repurposing; Record Linkage & Entity Resolution; Information Integration; Data Management; Multi-Agent LLM Systems; Agentic Pipelines for Statistical Data Production; Knowledge Graphs & Dependency Networks; Provenance Tracking; NLP & Computational Text Analysis; Privacy Law Policy & Implementation; Research Design; Quantitative & Qualitative Data Analysis; Organization Theory; Network Analysis; Big Data

Awards and Honors
  • (2024) Consulting Scholar, Brookings Institution Roundtable for Equitable Data Pathways — Data Governance Project.
  • (2022) Proposal Reviewer, NSF Methodology, Measurement, and Statistics (MMS) Program.
  • (2021–2025) Member, iTHRIV (integrated Translational Health Research Institute of Virginia) Scientific Advisory Board.
  • (2018–2019) Member, Arlington County Open Data Advisory Group.
  • (2013) Winner, Cross-Boundary Collaboration on IT Initiatives, Government Technology's annual Commonwealth of Virginia’s Innovative Technology Symposium (COVITS 2013). Awarded for the creation of the Virginia Longitudinal Data System (VLDS), a multi-agency data integration system for Virginia.
  • (2010) Invited participant to the Virginia Governor's Early Childhood Advisory Council (ECAC) on Cross-Agency Data Integration. 
  • (2009) Invited expert on methods of public-sector data integration and issues created by federal and state privacy laws for a workshop on Research Use of State Longitudinal Data Systems sponsored by the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS), the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), and the Institute of Education Sciences (IES).
  • (1999) Nominated by the Association of State Governments for Award in Innovation in State Government for the design, development, and deployment of Travel Shenandoah, a public-private partnership for Advanced Traveler Information Systems in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. 
  • (1999) Appointed Member of the Congressional Commission on I-81 Truck Safety.
Education

Ph.D. in Public Policy & Administration, Virginia Tech University  
M.P.A. in Public Administration, James Madison University  
B.A. in Psychology, University of Delaware