Anthony Bryk, Spencer Chair in Organizational Studies in the School of Education and the Graduate School of Business, has been selected as the next president of the Carnegie Foundation.

Bryk will begin his tenure in August. The 103 year-old Carnegie Foundation, which focuses on research and policy related to education, has been led for 11 years by Lee S. Schulman, who is retiring.

“[Bryk] has a tremendous ability to think and act across disciplines and to bring together theory and practice,” said David S. Tatel, chairman of the Carnegie Board of Trustees, in a press release.

Bryk previously helped found the Center for Urban School Improvement at the University of Chicago, as well as the Consortium on Chicago School Research. He is best known as a developer of a statistical technique called hierarchical linear modeling and is also researching the use of technology in schools.

“We’re in a period of extraordinary institutional change in U.S. education,” Bryk told The Chronicle of Higher Education on Tuesday. “The systems that we put in place, largely as we turned into the 20th century and into an industrial economy and a period of urbanization — all of those institutions are now being seriously challenged as we aspire to do much more, for many more students, than ever before, and to do it with much greater levels of efficiency.”

“And sitting in the middle of this is this whale of technology, which is totally transforming how we live and how we work,” he continued. “The transformation in the context of schooling may be a little bit slower than in some other institutions, but it seems quite clear that profound changes are coming here.”