Our Team
Tim Pavlis
Partner and Founder
After an undergraduate degree in Physics from Princeton, Tim interrupted a professional services career — first investment banking at JP Morgan, then a decade in strategy consulting at Monitor Group and Bain & Company — with a stint in philosophy graduate school. He finally combined purpose and expertise in creating the strategy and analytics team for the Provost at Yale University. In this role Tim honed his distinctive approach of pairing rigorous analytics with a human-centric view of human decision-making and action in the unique culture of higher education.
Tim founded Ad Verum Partners in order to spend his time directly serving academic leaders with a customized approach while helping to build the leadership capacity of university teams. Tim is based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Naureen Rashid
Senior Consultant
After an undergraduate degree in Economics & Political Science from Yale, Naureen began her career at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. After a Master’s in Economics from Columbia, She returned to Yale as a founding member of the university’s strategic analysis team. Relocating to San Diego, she deepened her commitment to higher education as a Senior Data Analyst and Program Manager in the Health Sciences Office of Faculty Affairs at UC San Diego. In 2023, she completed her doctorate in Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership, from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Naureen’s career is defined by leveraging data and strategic insights to drive positive change in education and public policy, and she is excited to serve a range of institutions with Ad Verum. Naureen is based in San Diego, California.
Advisory Board
Our Advisory Board, chaired by Yale’s former Provost Ben Polak, taps into deep institutional leadership experience to shape Ad Verum’s services and directly advise in select client engagements.
William C. Brainard Professor of
Economics and Former Provost, Yale University
Ben Polak
Ben Polak is an expert on decision theory, game theory, and economic history. His work explores economic agents whose goals are richer than those captured in traditional models. He is a dedicated teacher both on-line and in person. His course on games and strategy aimed at undergraduates and at business-school students is one of the most popular electives at Yale. A graduate of Cambridge University, he earned his MA at Northwestern University and his PhD from Harvard University.
Ben served as Yale’s Provost from 2013-2020. He hired Tim because he believes in the value of a data-informed, rigorous approach to thinking about what is possible and how to get there. He now chairs AVP’s advisory board to bring that approach to others.
Margaret Walker Alexander Professor of Human Development and Social Policy, Northwestern University
Diane Schanzenbach
Diane Schanzenbach is a leading economic expert in anti-poverty programs, food insecurity, and education policy. She was formerly the Director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution and Director of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern. She graduated magna cum laude from Wellesley with a BA in economics and religion, and received a PhD in economics from Princeton.
Diane’s work is motivated by a desire to offer evidence and solutions, based on rigorous research. At Ad Verum she contributes research expertise as well as first-hand experience in creating inter-disciplinary educational programs and in university leadership.
Sterling Professor of Political Science, Director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University
Alan Gerber
Alan Gerber is Sterling Professor of Political Science, director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, and professor of economics and of and statistics and data science at Yale University. He also has affiliations in the Yale School of Public Health and the Jackson School of Global Affairs. Previously he was appointed the Faculty of Arts and Sciences divisional director for the social sciences and became the inaugural FAS dean of social science, serving in this role from 2014 to 2021. Alan earned his BA from Yale and his PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Alan’s current research focuses on the political economy of evidence production and use in public policy and organizations. He is involved with Ad Verum in order to share with others both his expertise in policy analysis and governance as well as his personal experience as the Dean of Social Science at Yale.