FAMILY AND PARENTING POLICIES AND INTERVENTION
WORKING GROUP PARTICIPANT BIOS
March 27-29, 2015
Cambridge, MA
ANDREW CHERLIN
Andrew Cherlin is the Benjamin H. Griswold III Professor of Public Policy and the
Sociology Department Chair at Johns Hopkins University. His research is in the
sociology of families and public policy. Dr. Cherlin has published books and articles
on topics such as marriage, divorce, children’s well-being, intergenerational
relations, family policy, and welfare policy. His most recent book (December 2014)
is Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America. He
was also a principal investigator of the “Three-City Study,” an interdisciplinary
study of low-income children and their caregivers in the post-welfare-reform era.
KATHY EDIN
Kathryn Edin is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in the Department of
Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. She studies poverty by deploying
ethnographic observations, in-depth interviews, and mixed method approaches to
the domain of welfare and low-wage work, family life, and neighborhood contexts.
Ongoing projects include: a study of extreme poverty in the U.S.; a book on the
lives of the working poor, the intergenerational transmission of poverty, and a
study on the tradeoffs moderate and low income families make when deciding
where to live, what kind of place to rent or purchase, and where to send their
children to school.
MARK EDWARDS
Mark Edwards is the Founder and Co-Chair of Opportunity Nation, a bipartisan,
multi-sector campaign to enhance economic opportunity and mobility in America.
For 23 years he worked on the board of Horizons for Homeless Children and
became troubled by data indicating that it is now more difficult than ever for a
child born in a low-income area to become upwardly mobile. He began working
with partner coalitions and organizations to launch Opportunity Nation, which has
now created the Opportunity Index, a tool that measures 16 factors for economic,
educational, and civic opportunity across regions.
BILL GALSTON
William Galston holds the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in the Brookings Institution’s
Governance Studies Program, where he serves as a senior fellow. He is also College
Park Professor at the University of Maryland. A former policy advisor to President
Clinton and presidential candidates, Galston is an expert on domestic policy,
political campaigns, and elections. His current research focuses on designing a new
social contract and the implications of political polarization.
FAMILY AND PARENTING POLICIES AND INTERVENTION
WORKING GROUP PARTICIPANT BIOS
March 27-29, 2015
Cambridge, MA
ARIEL KALIL
Ariel Kalil is a professor at the University of Chicago, where she also directs the
Center for Human Potential and Public Policy and co-directs the Behavioral Insights
and Parenting Lab. She is a developmental psychologist who studies economic
conditions, parenting, and child development. Her current research examines the
historical evolution of income-based gaps in parenting behavior and children’s
cognitive and non-cognitive skills. She is currently leading a variety of field
experiments designed to strengthen parental engagement and child development
in low-income families using tools drawn from behavioral economics and
neuroscience.
SARA MCLANAHAN
Sara McLanahan is the William S. Tod Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at
Princeton University. She is also Director of the Bendheim-Thoman Center for
Research on Child Wellbeing and Editor-in-Chief of The Future of Children, a journal
dedicated to providing research and analysis for effective policies and programs for
children. Her early work focused on the growth of single-mother families, and she is
currently studying “fragile families,” unmarried parents raising a child together. She
is interested in the effects of family structure on social inequality and the roles that
public policies can play in addressing the needs of families and children.
RON MINCY
Ronald Mincy is the Maurice V. Russell Professor of Social Policy and Social Work
Practice at Columbia University. He previously served at the Ford Foundation where
he worked on issues such as improving U.S. social welfare policies for low-income
fathers, especially child support, and workforce development policies; he also
served on the Clinton Administration’s Welfare Reform Task Force. Dr. Mincy’s
research focuses on economic and social mobility, child support, income security
policy, responsible fatherhood, low-wage labor markets, and urban poverty.
BOB PUTNAM
Robert D. Putnam is Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard. He is a member of
the Na-tional Academy of Sciences and the British Academy, and past president of
the American Politi-cal Science Association. He has received numerous scholarly
honors, including the Skytte Prize, the most prestigious global award in political
science, and the National Humanities Medal, the nation’s highest honor for
contributions to the humanities. He has written fourteen books, including Bowling
Alone and Making Democracy Work, both among the most cited publica-tions in
the social sciences in the last half century. He is now working on a major project
“Inequality and opportunity: a growing class gap among American young people
and the im-plications for social mobility” and his next book, “Our Kids: The
American Dream in Crisis” is forthcoming March 2015.
FAMILY AND PARENTING POLICIES AND INTERVENTION
WORKING GROUP PARTICIPANT BIOS
March 27-29, 2015
Cambridge, MA
RICHARD REEVES
Richard Reeves is a fellow in Economic Studies and policy director for the Center on
Children and Families at the Brookings Institute, whose research focuses on
economic mobility. His principal areas of interest are the theory and practice of
coalition building, the development of progressive political thought, policies
relating to social mobility, the economics and politics of wellbeing, the formation of
character, contemporary gender and masculinity, the future of the workplace, and
organizational leadership.
BELLE SAWHILL
Isabel Sawhill is a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution.
She serves as co-director of the Budgeting for National Priorities project and codirector of the Center on Children and Families. In 2009, she began the Social
Genome Project, an initiative that seeks to determine how to increase economic
opportunity for disadvantaged children. She also served as an associate director at
the Office of Management and Budget from 1993 to 1995, where her
responsibilities included all of the human resource programs of the federal
government, accounting for one third of the federal budget. Her research has
focused on economic and social issues, including fiscal policy, economic growth,
poverty and inequality, welfare reform, the well-being of children, and changes in
the family.
SCOTT STANLEY
Scott Stanley is a research professor and co-director of the Center for Marital and
Family Studies at the University of Denver. His research interests include
commitment, cohabitation, communication, conflict, risk factors for divorce, the
prevention of marital distress, and couple development before marriage. His
greatest intellectual passion is focused on advancing basic scientific understanding
of unmarried and/or premarital romantic relationships, especially related to factors
that impact the development of commitment and log-term outcomes.
BRAD WILCOX
Brad Wilcox is Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of
Virginia, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, Visiting
Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for
Family Studies. Professor Wilcox’s research has focused on marriage, fatherhood,
and cohabitation, especially on the ways that family structure, civil society, and
culture influence the quality and stability of family life in the United States and
around the globe. Now, Dr. Wilcox is exploring the contribution that families make
to the economic welfare of individuals and societies.