Siobhan Mills De La Rosa

Siobhan Mills De La Rosa is a senior researcher at AIR. She is passionate about using evaluation and data analytics to identify and replicate strategies that strengthen the workforce system. She brings over a decade of experience designing and implementing experimental, implementation, and cost studies of job training, income security, and other labor programs. She is an expert in evaluation methods, serving as a senior reviewer on the U.S. DOL’s Clearinghouse for Labor Evaluation and Research and the evaluation technical assistance task lead for the U.S. DOL’s Reemployment Services and Eligibility Assessment Evidence Building Portfolio Project. Among Mills De La Rosa’s top priorities is generating easily understood evidence products that can be used by practitioners and policy makers to continuously improve service delivery.

Prior to AIR, Mills De La Rosa served as a deputy project director and task lead for a wide range of U.S. DOL projects at Abt Associates. In these roles, she contributed to the design and analysis of impact, cost, and implementation studies for apprenticeship, career pathways, and reemployment services programs. For the U.S. DOL’s Career Pathways Descriptive and Analytical study, Mills De La Rosa led the machine learning study, which produced important insights on how to use natural language processing for future workforce development projects and oversaw data collection for a meta-analysis identifying which program features drive impacts of career pathways programs. As the task lead for the U.S. DOL’s American Apprenticeship Initiative Evaluation, Mills De La Rosa led the development of an employer survey, oversaw data collection, and co-authored the final report detailing the returns employers experience by investing in apprenticeship. She was also deeply involved in the development of the grantee survey. Mills De La Rosa also gained extensive experience in administrative data collection and analysis through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Job Search Assistance Strategies and Pathways to Advancing Careers and Education studies.

In addition to her evaluation experience, Mills De La Rosa worked in a direct service role in the beginning of her career, providing job development and job readiness services to low-income young adults in New York City. To this day, this experience shapes her perspectives on the kinds of evidence practitioners need and what the field can do to provide it in a timely fashion.