UMass Boston

Holly Jacobs serves the Center for Social Development and Education as director of program evaluation, developing and leading the various research and evaluation projects conducted at the CSDE. Jacobs earned her MA from Boston College and her BA at Boston University. Jacobs also holds a graduate certificate in Survey Research from UMass Boston. Before joining the CSDE staff, she worked at the Institute for Community Inclusion as a study coordinator on public policy demonstration projects for individuals with disabilities receiving employment supports from state vocational rehabilitation agencies. Earlier in her career, she was a vocational counselor for adolescents with traumatic brain injury and researched children’s and adult’s conceptions of people, animals, and objects to inform school curricula.

Jacobs brings survey design and program evaluation experience to the CSDE’s projects and community programs, including Special Olympics Unified Champion Schools, Camp Shriver, and Saturday Camp. Because of her background in research, education, and disability, she is able to guide the CSDE’s local, national, and international endeavors with an emphasis on rigorous and comprehensive program evaluation design.

Jacobs’s interests include peer relationships among children and adolescents with and without intellectual disability, social inclusion of students with intellectual disability, and school-based interventions. She also supervises research assistants and interns and serves on the UMass Boston Institutional Review Board reviewing and approving the human subjects research conducted at UMass Boston.