Maria D. Fitzpatrick is an Associate Professor in the Department of Policy and Management, Associate Director of Data for Evidence-Based Policy and Milman Fellow at the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research, and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.  She is also an Affiliate in the CESifo Research Network, the Cornell Population Center, the Center for the Study of Inequality, and the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research.  Her research focus is on child and family policy, with a particular interest in the economics of education.  Specific research studies have focused on early childhood education policies, higher education, teacher compensation, benefits and labor supply, teacher pensions and retirement, child maltreatment, incarceration’s effects on children and mothers, and the effects of retirement on the health of older Americans.

Before arriving at Cornell, Maria Fitzpatrick was a Searle Freedom Trust postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University.  She received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Virginia, where she was both an Institute for Education Sciences and Spencer Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellow.  She obtained her B.A. in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Since being at Cornell, she spent one year as a visiting scholar at the National Bureau of Economics Research.