Lei Ye is a principal research data analyst at ETS. She joined the organization in 2008, where she has worked on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Her contribution includes data analysis in support of the 2009 NAEP national and state assessments in reading and math and the 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2019 NAEP reading assessments. She led the 2010, 2014, and 2018 NAEP national civics assessment. She has also participated in a variety of NAEP research projects such as the 2019 NAEP Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) study, NAEP’s transition from paper-based to digitally based assessments, and research work with ETS Presidential Appointee Rebecca Zwick including a DIF estimation study and a constrained optimization study. As a member of the 2009 and 2015 NAEP reading teams, Ye was awarded two ETS Presidential Awards. Several papers, from her collaboration with Rebecca Zwick and Steve Isham, were published in academic journals such as Journal of Educational Measurement and Applied Measurement in Education.
Ye graduated from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst with a master of science in statistics. She also holds a bachelor of science in information and computing from Nanjing Normal University in Nanjing, China.