Mary Kay Dugan

Managing TA Consultant

Mary Kay Dugan is a managing technical assistant consultant at AIR. She is passionate about identifying evidence-based promising practices and translating them into policies and effective programs focused on underserved populations including disadvantaged youth and young adults. Dugan has over 30 years of experience helping federal, state, and local governments and non-profit organizations design and improve their education and employment and training programs. She has expertise in mixed-methods research designs, survey data collection, implementation and outcome evaluation studies, and technical assistance that supports high quality program delivery. At AIR, she leads a large federal project to implement a new career pathway planning program for at-risk youth for the U.S. Department of Labor. 

Prior to joining AIR, Dugan served as the IMPAQ International project director for work in Washington State to provide research and technical assistance support to the U.S. Department of Education’s Northwest Regional Education Laboratories (REL) to promote high quality STEM education. She also served the project director for a National Governor’s Association STEM Education Alliance grant to develop a state-wide strategic framework to improve college and career readiness and a web-based data dashboard to monitor the number of STEM-trained workers in Washington.

Dugan spent decades at Battelle Memorial Institute designing and conducting large-scale education and workforce training projects. During her tenure, she led a project to provide statistical and technical assistance support for the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Job Corps. She was also responsible for co-leading a 10-year longitudinal survey to track the career trajectories of students applying to graduate business schools nationwide. Finally, Dugan was responsible for the evaluation of several state grant efforts to evaluate the implementation of various entrepreneurship programs and investigate the impacts of these services on participants’ post program self-employment and labor market outcomes.

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Expertise
Afterschool and Expanded Learning
Charter Schools and School Choice
College and Career Readiness
Postsecondary Education
School Climate
STEM
Human Services
Mentoring
Workforce
Adult Learning
Disability and Rehabilitation
Human Capital
Workforce Development

M.A. and B.A., Sociology, Washington State University

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