Touchstone Strengthens Analysis and Project Teams

Touchstone Research has made five recent appointments: Patricia Lopez and Michelle Richard as Senior Qualitative Analysts, Jack Keelan and Erik Erwin as Senior Project Directors, and Michael Kozloski as a Senior Quantitative Analyst.

The appointments continue a run which has added sixteen people to the firm over the past twelve months.

Touchstone is a full service MR firm headquartered in Branford, Connecticut, with teams in Los Angeles, Austin, Denver, Florida, Chicago, North Carolina, Michigan, New Jersey, New Hampshire and Rhode Island. Services include custom research and management of proprietary online panels and communities, in sectors such as youth and family, media and entertainment and technology research.

Lopez brings more than fifteen years of qual experience across a broad range of industries. She has moderated hundreds of focus groups with General Market and Hispanic consumers across acculturation levels, and also has in-depth experience in methods such as ethnographic research, shop-alongs, dial-test studies, biometrics, online groups and community boards, and one-on-one interviews. She joins from Focus Room/Fuel where she was the Qualitative Lead specializing in cultural insights; and worked earlier at PRS Invivo as a Research Manager & Moderator.

Richard will focus on the same sectors, brings more than 25 years' experience of studies including consumer voice, advertising and communication optimization, concept and positioning development, product and package evaluation, new product development/pipeline generation, and UX research. An expert qualitative moderator, with a high-energy moderating style, she has moderated hundreds of sessions and groups since 2007. She joins from North American Cryobank where she led the Marketing department, and worked earlier as a Senior Qual Consultant and moderator at Ipsos Understanding Unlimited, and as a Products Researcher on the R&D team for Procter & Gamble.

Keelan worked previously at Radio Flyer as a Design Researcher working end-to-end on projects including a variety of kids toys as well as electric bikes/scooters for adults. He holds a BS in Product Design from Stanford University where he also broke the 4-minute mile record.

Erwin is an anthropologist with over ten years of experience uncovering insights about consumer culture across sectors; and earlier worked in Iraq doing on-the-ground socio-cultural research for the US Army, seeking to help decision makers better understand the local culture and more effectively interact with the local people. He holds a master's degree in Anthropology from the University of Colorado, Boulder and a bachelor's in Business from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Kozloski has sixteen years' experience in consumer research, primarily in the grocery, household goods and electronics sectors. He spent thirteen years as a Quant Specialist and Senior Data Analyst for a small firm, helping to integrate more robust and advanced statistical analytics into the MR process; and has also worked for one of the largest social science research organizations in the US as a Research Scientist and most recently as a Senior Survey Research Analyst for a large nursing and health professions institution. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago, where he also completed his postdoctoral training in behavioral endocrinology; and an MS in Statistics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

CEO Aaron Burch comments: 'We are very excited to welcome Patricia, Michelle, Erik, Jack and Michael to our rapidly growing research organization. Each one of our new senior team members brings with them a wealth of knowledge and expertise across numerous methodologies and specializations that will help to significantly strengthen our teams' capabilities and bring tremendous value to our clients'. Burch says the latest hires 'check all of the boxes - social research scientists, cultural research experts, product design researchers with youth and family expertise, senior moderators with 15+ years' experience, anthropologists - the list goes on!'

The firm, which in 2020 launched a watermarking solution called Secure Content Testing (SCT), to protect client content used in studies, is online at www.touchstoneresearch.com .