Lief Esbenshade
Head Of Product And Research at Colleague AI
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolLief Esbenshade is a research-driven product leader with a decade of experience at the intersection of causal inference, edtech, and applied AI, currently leading product and research initiatives for K-12 at Colleague AI and the University of Washington's AmplifyLearn.AI. Trained as a PhD economist of education at Stanford, he translates rigorous quasi-experimental methods (difference-in-differences, survival analysis, regression discontinuity) into practical product evaluation and algorithmic design that support teaching and learning. His background spans district-level analytics, industry research at BrightBytes and Google, and hands-on classroom experience—giving him rare fluency across policy, data science, and pedagogy. Lief’s work blends national teacher surveys, data science training programs, and platform development to responsibly integrate LLMs and ML into learning tools. He hosts a mix of academic and personal projects on GitHub, signaling an ongoing commitment to open research and reproducible applied work.
9 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Economics of Education, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Economics of Education at Stanford University Graduate School of EducationBA Degree, Economics, BA Degree, Economics at Carleton College2008, 2008 at Oregon Episcopal SchoolMaster's Degree, Economics, Master's Degree, Economics at Stanford University
French
Stackoverflow
803reputation
43kreached
32answers
14questions
Github Skills (34)
district9
corona8
development-environment8
rates8
lottery8
synthetic8
r-package8
evaluation7
r7
rstudio7
ide7
purrr6
knitr6
dplyr6
ggplot6
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
williamlief/evaluationDB
Jun 2019 - Apr 2022
Database of public school district teacher evaluation reports
Contributions:186 commits, 8 PRs, 27 pushes in 2 years 10 months
reportsschool-districtteacherevaluationdistrict
williamlief/synth_vax
May 2021 - Feb 2022
Did Ohio’s Vaccine Lottery Increase Vaccination Rates? A Pre-Registered, Synthetic Control Study. Working paper: https://osf.io/a6de5/
Contributions:3 releases, 55 commits, 10 PRs in 8 months
lotteryratesdidohiovaccine
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.