Early Childhood Research Collaborative Conference
Speaker Biographies
W. Steven Barnett, professor of education economics and public policy and director of the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) at Rutgers University. His research includes studies of the economics of early care and education, including costs and benefits; the long term effects of preschool programs on children’s learning and development; and the distribution of educational opportunities. Recent publications include The State of Preschool 2006: State Preschool Yearbook, the fourth in a series of annual reports profiling state-funded prekindergarten programs in the United States.
Clive Belfield, associate director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He writes on the economics of education, with an emphasis on the economics of preschool. His research has been published in Journal of Human Resources, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Future of Children, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland’s Economic Commentary series.
Robert H. Bruininks, president of the University of Minnesota. He was appointed the 15th president of the University of Minnesota in November 2002, and has served the University for 39 years, formerly as a professor, dean, and executive vice president and provost. He has been honored with numerous awards, including the Kellogg Foundation National Leadership Fellowship. He is president emeritus of the American Association on Mental Retardation and has been elected a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society. Nationally, he serves on the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board and on the board of the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges; in Minnesota he serves as a member of the Itasca group and the Minnesota Business Partnership.
Frances Campbell, senior scientist at Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute. She is internationally recognized for her work on the Abecedarian Project, one of the longest-running longitudinal studies in the world. She has been an integral part of FPG’s history of serving as an objective, knowledgeable force for social change to enhance the lives of children and families. Her work with the Abecedarian Project, which began with a group of preschoolers in 1972, has followed these children as they have aged into adulthood.
Ronna Cook, associate director of Westat’s Human Services Group. Her primary area of specialization is child welfare. Since 1982, she has designed and directed major national studies dealing with services to children and their families, including the Evaluation of Family Preservation Services (a randomized experiment of the effectiveness of family preservation), the national Evaluation of Title IV-E Foster Child Independent Living Programs for Youth, and the National Study of Protection, Prevention, and Reunification Services to Children and their Families. She is presently the project director for the Head Start Impact Study and the Third Grade Follow-Up to the Head Start Impact Study.
Flavio Cunha, assistant professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania. He just received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. He conducts research on labor economics and family economics.
Barbara Devaney, senior vice president at Mathematica Policy Research. She has designed and conducted evaluation studies of a broad range of policy and program areas, including food and nutrition assistance programs, welfare policy and programs, and maternal and child health policies. She is a co-director of Mathematica’s Building Strong Families study, which evaluates initiatives to strengthen marriages and relationships in low-income families, and has served as principal investigator for the firm’s evaluation of abstinence education programs. Other evaluations have focused on the school lunch and school breakfast programs; the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC); and the Food Stamp Program.
Michelle M. Englund, research associate for the Early Childhood Research Collaborative. She is also a research associate with the Center for Early Education and Development and the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota. She has worked in numerous capacities on the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, an on-going longitudinal study of high-risk participants, for the past 18 years. In addition, she has worked on a number of other research projects, including research developing and testing an instructional design to facilitate higher order thinking skills of early childhood educators.
Jeremy D. Finn, professor of education at State University of New York at Buffalo. His research interests include students and schools at risk, student resilience, educational equity, classroom organization, and statistical methods. He has been conducting research on class size and teacher aides since 1985, when he began as external evaluator for Tennessee’s Project STAR. He has held positions at the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, the National Center for Education Statistics, and Temple University.
William Gormley, professor of government and public policy at Georgetown University. He has worked on child care policy issues, including Everybody's Children: Child Care as a Public Problem, published in 1995. Several common threads run through Gormley's published work: an interest in government reform and its consequences; an interest in functional and dysfunctional bureaucratic control mechanisms; and an interest in developing and applying analytical frameworks to improve our understanding of public policy choices.
James Heckman, the Henry Schultz distinguished service professor of economics at the University of Chicago. He holds a parallel appointment as director of social program evaluation at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago and is also a senior research fellow at the American Bar Foundation. His research combines both methodological and empirical interests in evaluating the impact of a variety of social programs on the economy and on society at large. He has received numerous honors for his research. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the National Academy of Sciences. He received the John Bates Clark Award of the American Economic Association in 1983 and the Nobel Prize in economics in 2000.
Vi-Nhuan Le, behavioral scientist with RAND. Her research interest and expertise lies in mathematics and science reform, educational assessment, and early childhood education. Her current projects include examining the relationship among key child care quality indicators that are part of a quality rating system and the relationship of this rating system to key child outcomes, exploring the relationships between school readiness skills at kindergarten entry and children’s long-term gains in reading and mathematics, and studying the effects of participation in an outreach intervention program on student motivation, academic achievement, and college attendance.
Robert G. Lynch, Everett E. Nuttle professor and chair of the department of economics at Washington College. One area of his research is to assess the impact of public investments in early childhood education on government budgets, the economy, and crime. Recent books published by the Economic Policy Institute include Exceptional Returns: Economic, Fiscal, and Social Benefits of Investment in Early Childhood Development and Enriching Children, Enriching the Nation: Public Investment in High-Quality Prekindergarten.
Elena Malofeeva, technical research associate at High/Scope Educational Research Foundation. She has research experience in evaluation of early childhood programs, instrument development, and early childhood curriculum development, especially as it applies to low socio-economic and minority populations. Her responsibilities at High/Scope include consultation on design, methodology, and data analysis as they apply to a variety of educational settings such as early childhood education programs, elementary schools, and after-school programs. She is currently the Project Director for the state pre-K Michigan School Readiness Program evaluation.
Andrew J. Mashburn, senior research scientist and assistant director of research methods at the Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning at the University of Virginia. He has authored numerous journal articles, technical reports, and evaluation reports on topics related to effective public preschool programs. His areas of expertise include state prekindergarten policies, prekindergarten program evaluation, and measurement of classroom processes and child outcomes.
David Olds, professor of pediatric medicine and director of the Prevention Research Center for Family and Child Health at the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center’s School of Medicine. His research focuses on investigating methods of preventing health and developmental problems in children and parents from low-income families. His original work, conducted in Elmira, N.Y., examined the effects of prenatal and postpartum nurse home visitation on the outcomes of pregnancy, infant care-giving, and maternal life-course development and determined the impact of those services on government spending. His current research focuses on the examination of the long-term impact of the Nurse Home Visiting Program on the health and development of low-income, first-time mothers and their families.
Suh-Ruu Ou, research associate at the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota. Her areas of specialization are program evaluation, research methodology, educational attainment, and the effects of early childhood intervention. Her publications include work on early intervention and educational attainment. Currently, her research focuses on school dropouts, GED recipients, and grade retention.
Helen Raikes is professor of child, youth and family studies at the University of Nebraska. She is principal investigator of the Midwest Child Care Research Consortium and co-principal investigator of Quality Intervention in Early Care and Education. Her research interests include intervention programs for vulnerable children, antecedents to language and literacy development, parent-child and teacher-child relationships and their relations to outcomes, optimizing parenting practices, and assessment and provision of quality interventions in child care programs.
Sharon L. Ramey, founding director of the Georgetown University Center on Health and Education and is the Susan H. Mayer professor in child and family studies. Her research has focused on the effects of the environment on behavior, including longitudinal studies of the effects of early experience on children “at risk” for school failure. Her professional interests include the study of the development of intelligence and children’s competency, early experience and early intervention, the changing American family, and the transition to school. She has written more than 200 scientific papers and seven books.
Craig Ramey, director of the Georgetown University Center for Health and Education. He specializes in the study of factors affecting young children’s development of intelligence, social competence, and academic achievement. He was appointed chairman of the National Board for Education Sciences and is the author of more than 225 publications, including five books. He frequently consults with federal and state governments as well as private agencies, foundations, and the news media.
Arthur J. Reynolds, professor at the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota and co-director of the Early Childhood Research Collaborative. His research focuses on early educational interventions, evaluation research, prevention science, and school and family influences on development. Reynolds is director of the Chicago Longitudinal Study, one of the largest and most extensive studies of the effects of early childhood intervention. His publications include Success in Early Intervention: The Child-Parent Centers (2000), Early Childhood Programs for a New Century (2003), as well as a cost-benefit analysis of the Child-Parent Center Program.
Arthur J. Rolnick, senior vice president and director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and co-director of the Early Childhood Research Collaborative. His research interests include the economics of early childhood development, banking and financial economics, monetary policy, monetary history, and the economics of federalism. His essays on such public policy issues as “Early Childhood Development: Economic Development with a High Public Return” and “Congress Should End the Economic War Among the States” have gained national attention. He serves on several nonprofit boards, including the Minnesota Early Learning Foundation and Ready 4 K.
Larry Schweinhart, president, High/Scope Educational Research Foundation. He has served as director of the Head Start Quality Research Center, leading an effort to define and assess quality in Head Start programs; and director of the High/Scope Child Observation Record studies, designing and implementing studies of the feasibility, reliability, and validity of this tool in assessing children's development in early childhood programs. He is the author of numerous publications and reports for High/Scope and has published extensively in external venues on early childhood education, curriculum, evaluation, and assessment, including the Perry Preschool Study.
Gary H. Stern, president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and member of the Federal Open Market Committee. He joined the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis in 1982 as senior vice president and director of research, before becoming president in 1985. Before joining the Minneapolis Fed, he was a partner in a New York-based economic consulting firm. His experience includes seven years at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He serves on the board of trustees of Hamline University and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and the board of directors of the National Council on Economic Education. He is co-author of Too Big to Fail: The Hazards of Bank Bailouts.
Judy Temple, associate professor of economics, University of Minnesota. She holds a joint position at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs and the Department of Applied Economics. Her recent research focuses on the evaluation of long-term effects of early educational interventions. She is a co-principal investigator on the Chicago Longitudinal Study and is also an adjunct professor in the Institute of Child Development. Before arriving at the University of Minnesota in 2006, she was an associate professor of economics at Northern Illinois University.
Deborah Vandell, chair of the department of education at the University of California-Irvine. Her research focuses on the effects of developmental contexts (early child care, schools, after-school programs, families, neighborhoods) on children’s social, behavioral, and academic functioning. As one of the principal investigators with the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, she has conducted an intensive study of the development of 1,300 children from birth through age 15. Her work typically involves mixed methods, including observations, interviews, and surveys and spans infancy through adolescence.
Edward Zigler, Sterling professor of psychology, emeritus, at Yale University and director, emeritus, of the Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy. He was a member of the National Planning and Steering Committee of Project Head Start. In 1970, he was named by President Nixon to become the first Director of the Office of Child Development (now the Administration on Children, Youth and Families) and chief of the U.S. Children’s Bureau. While in Washington, he was responsible for administering the nation’s Head Start program and led efforts to conceptualize and mount other innovative programs such as Home Start, Education for Parenthood, the Child Development Associate, and the Child and Family Resource Program. His research includes mental retardation, psychopathology, intervention programs for economically disadvantaged children, and the effects of out-of-home care on the children of working parents.
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