Affiliated Scholars
Margaret (Peg) R. Burchinal
University of Virginia
Burchinal is a leading researcher and statistician in child care research, and a widely recognized applied statistician. She currently leads one of the IES Early Childhood Network research studies and co-leads an adult follow-up of the Abecedarian Project and an OPRE study designed to manipulate different dimensions of quality.
Alejandra Barazza
HighScope Foundation
Barrazza cultivates a shared vision in which high school graduation and post-secondary education are understood not as distant ideals, but as attainable and collective goals. Emphasizing the learning process rather than outcomes alone, she advocates learning through play, even in educational settings where this approach is often undervalued in early childhood classrooms.
Stephanie Carlson
University of Minnesota
She investigates basic developmental processes in executive function (brain basis of self-control) in children from infancy through adolescence, with a focus on the preschool period.
Si Chen
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Her academic and research career is dedicated to exploring the dynamic language and literacy environments of young children, both in school settings and in their everyday lives. One of the core areas of Dr. Chenâs research involves the rigorous evaluation of randomized literacy interventions in China, with a particular focus on rural early childhood education settings.
Jill Claxton
Highscope Foundation
She has collected program and child data and trained others to do so both nationally and internationally. She has coordinated and supervised several projects which entail monitoring multi-site research efforts. She served as the project coordinator for the design, development, and validation of the Family Child Care Program Quality Assessment, Infant-Toddler Program Quality Assessment, and Classroom Coach.
Amanda Dettmer
Yale University
Dettmer examines the impact of early life factors and individual differences on health across the lifespan. For this research, she takes a comparative approach: she relies on nonhuman primates as translational models for human child development, employing multidisciplinary approaches including ethology, neuroendocrinology, immunology, and epigenetics.
Jorge Luis GarcĂa
Texas A&M University
GarcĂa is a labor economist investigating the economic fundamentals that drive the efficiency and effectiveness of social policies addressing poverty in the US and developing countries. Some of his work also applies tools from public and development economics.
Shiry Ginosar
TTIC
Ginosar works at the intersection of computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Her research explores grounded visual understanding, with particular contributions to social behavior prediction, visual data mining, and video synthesis. While rooted in machine perception, her approach is deeply interdisciplinary, drawing from psychology, neuroscience, and the arts.
Marc Hernandez
NORC
Hernandez' research and evaluation program focuses on identifying, developing, and evaluating programs interventions, tools, technologies, best practices, and policies designed to improve educational outcomes for disadvantaged children, early in their lives (i.e., over the birth to third grade continuum).
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V. Joseph Hotz
The University of Chicago
Hotzâs areas of research include the economics of the family, economic demography, labor economics, population health, applied econometrics, and the evaluation of social programs. His most recent work has focused on the role of families in the intergenerational transmission of economic attainment, the intergenerational consequences of disparities in morbidity and mortality for Americaâs families and the balancing of data confidentiality and usability in the data products of U.S. federal statistical agencies.
Juanna Schrøter Joensen
The University of Chicago
Joensen's research examines how people make consequential choices about education, work, and family formation, and how policies can shape these choices and their consequences. She quantifies how incentives and circumstances interact with individual endowments and information to shape human capital formation.
Tim Kautz
Mathematica
Kautz' work focuses on rigorous evaluations of education, employment, and human services programs, as well as the measurement of social-emotional and self-regulation skills. He designs and leads impact evaluations and measurement studies, with expertise in randomized controlled trials, design-based methods, and Bayesian analysis.
Weerachart Kilenthong
University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce
Kilenthong's current research focuses on early childhood and human capital development. One long-term research project is the Thailand Childhood Longitudinal Survey (TCLS), which collects detailed information regarding human development from early childhood. Another project is the RIECE Thailand project, which promotes the HighScope approach to enhance the quality of early childhood education nationwide.
Patrick Kyllonen
ETS
Kyllonen has conducted innovative research on (a) higher education assessment, (b) workforce readiness, (c) international large-scale assessment (e.g., Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA), and (d) 21st century skills assessment, such as creativity, collaborative problem solving and situational interviews.
Susan Chang Lopez
University of the West Indies
Chang Lopez' research activities are focused on the impact of low-cost psychosocial interventions on the cognitive, academic and behavioral development of at-risk children. She has extensive experience in the adaptation of psychometric tests and other instruments in Jamaica and other developing countries.
Gloria Li
City University of Hong Kong
Li's current research interests include labor economics and economic growth.
Bei Lu
China Development Research Foundation
Bei Lu is the Senior Program Manager of the Child Development Research Institute
LU Mai
China Development Research Foundation
LU Mai is the Secretary General of China Development Research Foundation
Tammy McGavock
Grinnell College
McGavock's work lies at the intersection of development and labor economics, with particular focus on intra-household allocation and traditional social norms around gender and caretaking. She uses quasi-experimental and experimental techniques to study, for example, child marriage; female genital cutting; time use and the allocation of labor to employment and unpaid chores; and schooling and living arrangements.
Abigail Palmer Molina
The University of Chicago
Palmer Molinaâs research focuses on promoting infant and early childhood mental health and parent/caregiver resilience, with an emphasis on advancing mental health equity for marginalized, low-income parents of young children. Much of her work centers on developing and implementing cross-system family interventions for multiply stressed mothers, particularly those experiencing depression. The overarching goal of her work is to promote a âwhole familyâ approach to mental health and well-being that co-locates services for both children and parents and views caregivers as deeply deserving of support and investment.
Sally Grantham-McGregor
University College London
Grantham-McGregor has run many projects in low and middle income countries (LMIC) involving child nutrition and development and supervised many PhD/MSc students from LMICs. She established a research group at the University of the West Indies which investigated the effects of malnutrition and deprivation on child development.
Vitor Pereira
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
Pereira's work covers a range of topics including early childhood interventions, school dropout and retention, signaling in labor markets, human capital accumulation, teacher incentives, school choice, social program evaluation and agriculture. His recent research focuses on understanding how early investments, education systems, and social programs shape human capital accumulation and economic mobility.Â
Rodrigo Pinto
University of South Florida
Pinto's research centers on policy evaluation, causality, and applied econometrics. A key focus of his work is on identifying, estimating, and inferring causal effects. Recently, his research has focused on advancing causal inference in social experiments through revealed preference analysis, as well as leveraging machine learning techniques to improve policy evaluations.
Rafeh Qureshi
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Qureshi's research lies in the fields of Economics of Labor Markets and Applied Econometrics. In particular, he studies the effect of educational options and requirements in postsecondary education on individuals' outcomes later in their lifecycle.
Greg Shakhnarovich
TTIC
Shakhnarovich's research is centered on image and video understanding; perception of 3D world from images and videos; vision and language (e.g., "open vocabulary detection"); synthesis and perception of non-photorealistic imagery; image synthesis and stylization and lifting 2D imagery to 3D; automatic processing and recognition of sign languages; and understanding the role of embodiment in visual perception
Aleisha Sheridan
Building Blocks
Sheridan is President and CEO of Building Blocks.
Louise Derman-Sparks
Pacific Oaks College, Emerita
Derman-Sparks has worked for over 60 years on issues of diversity and social justice as a preschool teacher at the Perry Preschool Project, child-care center director, human development faculty member at Pacific Oaks College, and activist.
Dana Suskind
The University of Chicago
Suskind has dedicated her research and clinical life to optimizing foundational brain development and preventing early cognitive disparities and their lifelong impact. She is founder and co-director of the TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health, which aims to create a population-level shift in the knowledge and behavior of parents and caregivers to optimize the foundational brain development in children from birth to five years of age, particularly those born into poverty.
Susan Walker
University of the West Indies
Walker has led technically outstanding, multi-country, and policy-focused research, including the âReach Upâ early childhood development program.
Matthew Walter
TTIC
Walter is interested in developing intelligent, perceptually aware robots that are able to act robustly and effectively in unstructured environments, particularly with and alongside people. His research focuses on machine learning-based solutions that enable robots to learn to understand and interact with the people, places, and objects in their surroundings.
Tomoko Wakabayashi
Oakland University
Wakabayashi's research interest include identifying practices that promote high quality and equitable early care and education. She co-leads the early childhood subgroup of Oakland Universityâs partnership with the neighboring city of Pontiac and conducts community-based participatory action research.
Jin Zhou
City University of Hong Kong
Zhou's research focuses on understanding the skill formation process and its impact on labor market outcomes. In general, her research involves three big questions: (a) How should we measure skills?; (b)What are the mechanisms through which we learn and develop skills?; and (c) What are the impacts of skills on individualsâ lifecycle outcomes?
Affiliated Institutions
