Assistant Professor Dr. Jessica Pac was awarded the prestigious Vilas Associates Competition Award. This university-wide award recognizes new and ongoing research of the highest quality and significance. In addition to her role as an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Sandra Rosenbaum School of Social Work, Dr. Pac is a Faculty Affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty and the La Follette School of Public Affairs.
Dr. Pac received the award for her research into how social policies shape risk, health, and opportunity for children and families. Her work uses large-scale administrative data to generate causal evidence on how labor policies, safety net programs, and child welfare systems influence child safety, maternal health, family stability, and long-term opportunity. One of Dr. Pac’s areas of emerging research on the foster care system leverages advanced econometric methods to estimate the causal effect of child placement in foster care on the wellbeing of children and of their mothers. Dr. Pac and her coauthors use novel causal machine learning methods to model heterogeneous treatment effects, or individual treatment effects, providing insight into the types of individuals for whom foster care might be particularly salient – those with the most substantial benefit – and those for whom the policy is either ineffective or, potentially responsible for unwarranted harm. Other areas of Dr. Pac’s work are similarly focused on understanding treatment effect heterogeneity due to interactive effects between policies and demographic characteristics, for instance, helping policymakers target interventions and funding to the most vulnerable populations of children and their families.
In addition to the Vilas Associates Award, Dr. Pac’s work has received national recognition, including the 2023 Frank R. Breul Prize, the 2025 Early Career Award for the Council on Social Work Education (Child Welfare Track), the 2025-2026 Association of Population Centers Fellowship, the 2023 Excellence in Refereeing Award from the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, as well as top download and top cited paper awards for the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management When notified that she had won this most recent recognition , Dr. Pac expressed her appreciation saying, “I am deeply honored to receive the Vilas Associates Competition award in recognition of and support for my research. I am especially grateful for the recognition of my effort to meaningfully improve child welfare policy and practice.”
Faculty are nominated for the Vilas Associates award by their department chair and colleagues, who can nominate only one faculty member from their department. As the school’s director, Dr. Marci Ybarra explained, “Our Tenure Track Merit and Faculty Awards Committee reviewed the CVs of all eligible faculty members and unanimously agreed that Dr. Pac’s proposed research is an excellent fit with the award’s requirements.” The committee found Dr. Pac to be the right candidate due to her excellent and impactful research, as well as her work pursuing and receiving extramural funding, prolific journal publishing, and national service.
The school is proud to have a leading scholar like Dr. Pac on its faculty, whose important work contributed to reducing child maltreatment and promoting equity for all.