Our Leadership Team
Jade Caines Lee, Founder and President
Jade Caines Lee, Ph.D. is Founder and President of JCRG USA Inc. She is a social science researcher who specializes in education research, assessment, and evaluation. She has presented and published in the areas of validity, classroom assessment, evaluation research, and fairness issues in the educational measurement field, as well as in the areas of evaluation and intervention research that aims to improve teaching and learning for all people. She is also a career educator, having taught and/or mentored Pre-K through 12th grade, undergraduate, graduate students and life-long learners for over 20 years.
Dr. Lee received her undergraduate degree in Urban Studies/Urban Education from Stanford University, her master’s degree in Teaching Secondary English, Grades 7-12 from Brooklyn College, and her doctoral degree in Educational Research, Measurement, and Evaluation from Emory University. She was an Institute of Education Sciences’ postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania; spent almost 10 years as a PreK-12th grade public school teacher in New York City and in metro-Atlanta, GA; and has worked as a faculty member at Research 1 and Research 2 institutions for over 10 years including University of New Hampshire, Clark Atlanta University, University of Kansas, and Hampton University. She has also worked as a researcher and evaluator for several organizations including CRESST at UCLA and the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia. For fun, she enjoys spending time with her 3 energetic kids (ages 8, 6, and 5) where going on new adventures, having at-home dance parties, and snuggling are always go-to activities.
Jordan Lawson, Vice President
Jordan Lawson, Ph.D. is an education researcher, statistician, and software engineer with more than eight years of experience building technical solutions that advance high-impact research and clarify the effects of social programs. His academic work centers on credible causal inference from observational data, with an emphasis on matching algorithms and evaluation design. He has presented at national conferences and published in peer-reviewed journals on topics ranging from novel statistical methodology to educational achievement.
Prior to JCRG, Jordan worked with economists at Boston College and MIT to evaluate how student support interventions affect academic outcomes for students in under-resourced urban schools. Alongside his research, he developed a deep interest in programming and computing, which led to a role at Brown University, where he designs and maintains robust research tools and pipelines that enable accessible, reproducible analysis for interdisciplinary research teams.
At the intersection of software engineering and applied research, his aim is straightforward: build trustworthy, data-driven tools that help educators make better decisions, faster. His broader mission is to use technology and statistics to strengthen communities and contribute to a better society.