The science of early learning: A foundation for expanding opportunity

Speaker Biographies

Robert Doar is the Morgridge Fellow in Poverty Studies at AEI, where he studies and evaluates how free enterprise and improved federal policies and programs can reduce poverty and provide opportunities for vulnerable Americans. Before joining AEI, Doar worked for Mayor Michael Bloomberg as commissioner of New York City’s Human Resources Administration, where he administered 12 public assistance programs, including welfare, food assistance, public health insurance, and help for people living with HIV/AIDS. Before joining the Bloomberg administration, Doar was New York State commissioner of social services, helping make New York a model for the implementation of welfare reform.

Jack P. Shonkoff, M.D., is the Julius B. Richmond FAMRI Professor of Child Health and Development at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, and director of the university-wide Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. Under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences, he served as chair of the Board on Children, Youth, and Families and chaired a blue-ribbon committee that produced the landmark report, “From neurons to neighborhoods: The science of early childhood development.” Dr. Shonkoff has received multiple honors, including elected membership to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, the C. Anderson Aldrich Award in Child Development from the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the award for Distinguished Contributions to Public Policy for Children from the Society for Research in Child Development. In 2011, he launched Frontiers of Innovation, a multidimensional learning community of researchers, practitioners, policymakers, investors, experts in systems change, and creative-change agents who are committed to driving science-based innovation that achieves breakthrough impacts on the development and health of young children facing adversity.

Katharine B. Stevens is the inaugural research fellow in early-childhood education at the AEI, where she focuses on the research and politics surrounding early-childhood education, the role of early learning in expanding opportunity for low-income Americans, and the implementation challenges of rapidly growing early-childhood education initiatives. Stevens has 20 years of both field and research experience in K–12 urban education reform, focusing on teacher quality and human capital management. She recently published the dissertation “Opening the black box: Government teacher workforce policy in New York City,” which analyzed public policies governing teacher evaluation and accountability. Before returning to graduate school, she founded and led Teachers for Tomorrow, one of the first urban teacher-residency programs in the United States, which recruited and trained teachers for New York City’s lowest-performing schools. She began her career in public education as a preschool teacher in New Haven, Connecticut, and St. Louis, Missouri.