Wei Gao is a doctoral candidate in Measurement, Evaluation, Statistics, and Assessment, with a concentration in Quantitative Policy Evaluation, at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development.

Her research sits at the intersection of education policy, school finance, and educational access and opportunity. Her work seeks to understand how funding policies shape student experiences and outcomes and how education systems respond to demographic, enrollment, and fiscal changes. Her current work examines these issues through student mobility, inter- district school choice, and postsecondary enrollment decline and closure risk.

Across these projects, she draws on quasi-experimental and causal inference methods using large-scale administrative datasets, such as IPEDS and state longitudinal data, to examine how policies and institutional changes affect access, opportunity, and academic outcomes for students and institutions in rural and under-resourced communities.

Before starting her doctoral studies, Wei worked as a math teacher in rural China and as a data analyst at an educational technology company. She earned her BS in Biological Science from Sun Yat-sen University and her MEd in International Education Policy and Management from Vanderbilt University.