Chris Cate, alumnus of UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School and current Vice President for Research at the Student Veterans of America (SVA), helped lead that organization to landing a Google Impact Award of $1.5 million to conduct a three-year research project on student veteran persistence, a major focus of Dr. Cate's pioneering research while he was a doctoral student at UCSB.
The $1.5 million grant will support SVA’s Million Records Project. Over 2.5 years, this project will track the academic outcomes of more than 1 million student veterans, correlate on-campus services to high graduation rates, and act on the data collected to implement on-campus best practices at 950+ SVA chapters across the US with the goal of increasing veteran degree attainment.
Dr. Cate served as Associate Director for the Center of Advanced Studies of Individual Differences (CASID) at UC Santa Barbara, where he continued to work with student veterans and school administrators to improve services and develop programs to benefit student veterans. He graduated from the Department of Education at the Gevirtz School with a Master's of Arts in Research Methodology and a Doctorate in Special Education, Disability, and Risk Studies. His dissertation – Student Veteran College Experiences: Demographic Comparisons, Differences in Academic Experiences, and On-Campus Service Utilization – examined student veterans' college experiences and academic performance.