APPENDIX C
Biographical Sketches
Jacquelynne Eccles (Chair) is the Wilbert McKeachie collegiate professor of psychology, women’s studies, and education, as well as a research scientist at the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, and the interim chair of psychology at the University of Michigan. She has served on the faculty at Smith College, the University of Colorado, and the University of Michigan. In addition, she is past chair of the Advisory Committee for the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Directorate at the National Science Foundation, a member of the MacArthur Foundation Network on Successful Adolescent Development, the chair of the MacArthur Foundation Network on Successful Pathways through Middle Childhood, and associate editor of Child Development. Over the past 30 years, she has conducted research on a wide variety of topics ranging from gender role socialization, teacher expectations, and classroom influences on student motivation, to social development in the family and school context. Much of this work has focused on middle childhood and adolescence when health-compromising behaviors such as smoking increase dramatically. Using longitudinal survey methods, she has explored the characteristics of family, community, school,
and peer groups that either protect against or encourage such risky behaviors during these periods of life. She is coauthor of Women and Sex-Roles and of Managing to Make It. She has a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Cheryl Alexander is professor of population and family health sciences and director of the Center for Adolescent Health Promotion and Disease Prevention at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. The Center for Adolescent Health is one of 26 prevention research centers funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Her research has focused on health-risking behaviors of young adolescents, with a particular focus on gender differences in patterns of risk-taking. She has explored how social contexts including schools, neighborhoods, and families influence adolescent health risking behaviors. Most recently, she and her colleagues have begun to examine the effectiveness of community-based interventions in reducing adolescent health risks, such as tobacco use, early sexual intercourse, and sedentary behaviors. She was recently appointed to the Governor’s Council on Adolescent Pregnancy and is a member of the Committee on Adolescent Health and Development, formerly the Forum on Adolescence. She has a B.S.N. from the University of North Carolina and an M.P.H and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health.
Brett Brown is senior research associate and area director for social indicators research at Child Trends, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research firm. He oversaw the design and production of first four editions of Trends in the Well-Being of America’s Children and Youth, a comprehensive annual report featuring national trends in over 90 indicators of well-being released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. For the past several years, he has been a consultant to the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, playing a key role in the design and production of the first edition of America’s Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, an annual report to the President. He is a member of the core working group on adolescent health for the Healthy People 2010 project of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and has been part of an international group of researchers that is attempting to develop comparable indicators of child and youth well-being for advanced industrial societies. For the past several years, he has also provided technical assistance to the national and state Kids Count orga-
nizations sponsored by the Annie E.Casey Foundation. He has a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin.
Sarah Brown is director of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, a private and independent initiative organized in 1995 to stimulate actions nationwide to reduce adolescent pregnancy. Before this, she was a senior study director at the Institute of Medicine, where her last project before founding the Campaign was directing a major study on unintended pregnancy. She has published numerous scholarly and popular articles on a wide variety of topics in maternal and child health and in reproductive health and is also a frequent public speaker and media contact on these issues. She serves on numerous advisory committees of national organizations and on several boards as well, including that of the Alan Guttmacher Institute. She has an M.A. in public health from the University of North Carolina.
Kenyon S.Chan is dean of the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts and professor of psychology at Loyola Marymount University. His research focuses on social science perspectives on ethnic studies, social policy, and interdisciplinary analyses of race in America. He is recognized as an expert on the effects of race on the emotional development of children and has written extensively on the sociocultural factors that influence motivation, learning, and schooling with particular attention to poor and immigrant children. He has a Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Elizabeth Colson is professor emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her primary research interest lies in the longitudinal study of social and cultural change. She is interested in development, the role of development agencies, migration, the impact of large-scale disruptions, and the adjustment of refugees and other forced migrants. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. She has a Ph.D. from Radcliffe College.
Thomas Cook is professor of sociology, psychology, education and social policy and faculty fellow in the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. His major research interest is examining routes out of poverty, especially for racial minorities in the inner city, with special emphasis on how material and social resources activate self-help behavior. He is also studying the management strategies parents use in differ-
ent neighborhoods, the differing levels of resources available to youth and their families, and how these neighborhood differences impact on parental coping techniques and adolescent development. He is a member of the MacArthur Network on Successful Adolescence in High-Risk Settings. He has a Ph.D. in communications from Stanford University.
Peter Edelman is a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center, where he has been on the faculty since 1982. He took leave from 1993 until 1996 to serve in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, first as counselor to Secretary Donna Shalala and then as assistant secretary for planning and evaluation. He was associate dean of the Law Center in the late 1980s, director of the New York State Division for Youth in the late 1970s, and vice president of the University of Massachusetts before that. He was a legislative assistant to Senator Robert F.Kennedy from 1965 to 1968 and was issues director for Senator Edward Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1980. He served as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Arthur J.Goldberg in 1962–1963 and to Judge Henry J.Friendly on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and was special assistant to Assistant Attorney General John Douglas in the U.S. Department of Justice following his Supreme Court clerkship. He has a J.D. from Harvard School of Law.
Caswell Evans is executive editor and project director, Surgeon General’s Report on Oral Health on an Inter-Agency Personnel Agreement with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In this capacity he is located at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research at the National Institutes of Health. The charge of the surgeon general’s report was “to define, describe, and evaluate the interaction between oral health, health, and well-being (quality of life), through the life span in the context of changes in society.” The report was released by the surgeon general in May 2000. He also serves as adjunct professor at the School of Public Health and the School of Dentistry at the University of California, Los Angeles. A member of the Institute of Medicine, he has a D.D.S. from Columbia University.
Ronald Ferguson is lecturer in public policy and senior research associate at the Wiener Center for Social Policy in the John F.Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. His teaching and research cover topics in social policy and economic development, including special attention to problems associated with the education and employment of
populations that experience disproportionate levels of poverty in the United States. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Amy Gawad (Research Associate) is a staff member with the Board on Children, Youth, and Families of the National Research Council/Institutes of Medicine. Prior to her work on youth development at the National Academies, she had responsibility at the board for the dissemination of From Neurons to Neighborhoods, a report on the science of early childhood development, and for supporting members of the Forum on Adolescence. She has an M.P.H. from the George Washington University School of Public Health.
Jennifer Appleton Gootman (Study Director) is a staff member with the Board on Children, Youth, and Families of the National Research Council/Institutes of Medicine. She was previously a social science analyst for the Office of Planning and Evaluation in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Her work has focused on child and family policy for low-income families, including welfare reform, child care, child health, youth development, and teen pregnancy prevention issues. She has directed a number of community youth programs in Los Angeles and New York City, involving young people in leadership development, job preparedness, and community service. She has an M.A. in public policy from the New School for Social Research.
Robert Granger served on the Committee on Community-Level Programs for Youth until March 2000, when he became the new senior vice president at the William T.Grant Foundation, one of the funders of this project. Prior to this he served as senior vice president for education, children, and youth at the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation. He is an expert on programs and policies for low-income children and youth. Selected by the MacArthur Foundation as a core member of its research network on middle childhood, he has conducted numerous empirical studies; in recent years, he has focused particularly on public policies related to the effects of welfare policies on children and the evaluation of comprehensive school reforms. He has an Ed.D. in early childhood education from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Teresa LaFromboise is associate professor of education at Stanford University. She is concerned with helping ethnic minority students survive
the cultural adjustments, major life transitions, and other stresses that are typical and often neglected in children and adolescents. As a counseling psychologist with clinical and teaching experience in a wide variety of university and American Indian reservation settings, she is well equipped to guide new teachers in multicultural counseling and inventions. She has also developed a complete life skills development curriculum of problem-based lessons aimed at reducing the risk of suicide among American Indian adolescents, which has already been shown to be successful in high school students and is now being extended to younger students and their families. She has a Ph.D. in counseling psychology from the University of Oklahoma.
Reed Larson is professor of human development and family studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on adolescents’ daily emotions and experience, especially in the context of families and after-school activities. He has a Ph.D. in human development from the University of Chicago.
Milbrey McLaughlin is professor of education and public policy at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. She has been studying youth programs and neighborhood organizations since 1987. The first phase of this research focused on inner-city youth, and the second phase expands to include youth and their community resources from mid-sized cities to rural areas. She has a Ph.D. in education and social policy from Harvard University.
Elena Nightingale (Scholar-in-Residence) is a volunteer with the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. She is an adjunct professor of pediatrics at both Georgetown University Medical Center and George Washington University Medical Center. For more than eleven years she was special advisor to the president and senior program officer at Carnegie Corporation of New York and lecturer in social medicine at Harvard University. She is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Society of Medicine. She has also authored numerous book chapters and articles on microbial genetics; health (particularly child and adolescent health and well-being and health promotion and disease prevention); health policy; and human rights. She is a member of the Committee on Adolescent Health and
Development, a member emerita of the IOM Board on Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, and serves as liaison or advisor to several IOM activities. She has a Ph.D. in microbial genetics from the Rockefeller University and an M.D. from New York University School of Medicine.
Robert Plotnick serves on the faculty of the University of Washington as professor of public affairs, director of the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, and adjunct professor of economics, sociology and social work. He is also a research affiliate with the Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research has addressed a wide range of topics concerned with poverty, income inequality, income support policy, teenage and nonmarital childbearing, the application of benefit-cost analysis to social services, and related social policy issues. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
Rebekah Pinto (Senior Project Assistant) is a staff member with the Board on Children, Youth, and Families of the National Research Council/ Institutes of Medicine. She has helped the board organize workshops related to children and computer technology, family stresses in the 21st Century, and urban school reform. Before joining the board she worked as a communications associate at Catholics for a Free Choice. Before joining the National Academies her research focused on public health, women’s issues, and international family planning. She has a B.A. in anthropology from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Zena Stein is professor of public health (epidemiology) and psychiatry emerita at Columbia University. She is an expert in the prevention of AIDS in women and on the prevention of mental retardation. She is co-director of the HIV Center at Columbia with a major commitment to work in Southern Africa. Recently, her principal research efforts at the Center have been to develop protective methods for women that will reduce their risks of sexually transmitted infections; to study the epidemiology of perinatal HIV infection, including risks for maternal-infant transmission including breast feeding; factors involved in survival; and neurodevelopmental effects on infected infants. She has an M.A. in history at the University of Cape Town and an M.B. and B.Ch. in medicine at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
