Appendix
Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff
TUMAINI RUCKER COKER (Chair, she/her/hers) is chief of the division of general pediatrics and professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine and Seattle Children’s. As a general pediatrician and community-engaged health services researcher, her research focuses on community-partnered pediatric primary care delivery design to promote health equity and eliminate health and health care disparities for children and families in low-resource communities. Coker leads a successful and extramurally funded research program with a focus on community-engaged design, adaptation, testing, and dissemination of preventive care delivery models. She is the former and founding research director of the Health Equity Research Program at Seattle Children’s Center for Diversity and Health Equity and serves as the co-director of the University of Washington’s National Institutes of Health-funded Child Health Equity Research Fellowship. She was a member of the National Academies’ Committee on Implementing High Quality Primary Care and is a member of the United States Preventive Task Force Committee. Coker received her undergraduate degree from Stanford University, her M.B.A. at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Anderson School of Management, and an M.D. at the Drew/UCLA Medical Program at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. She completed her pediatric residency at Cedars Sinai Medical Center, and a postdoctoral fellowship with the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at the University of Chicago.
TINA L. CHENG (she/her/hers) is the B.K. Rachford professor of pediatrics, chair of the Department of Pediatrics, University of Cincinnati, director of the Cincinnati Children’s Research Foundation, and chief medical officer at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. She was previously chair of pediatrics and pediatrician-in-chief at Johns Hopkins University. Her clinical work, teaching, and research focuses on child, adolescent, and family perspectives on improving health and community-integrated models to interrupt the intergenerational cycle of disadvantage. She co-led the National Institutes of Health-funded DC-Baltimore Research Center on Child Health Disparities and the establishment of two clinical and research innovation centers at Johns Hopkins University, the Centro SOL: Johns Hopkins Center for Salud/(Health) and the Opportunity for Latinos and the Rales Center on the Integration of Health and Education. As the past president of the Academic Pediatric Association (APA), Cheng has received the American Academy of Pediatrics Education Award, Job Lewis Smith Award for Community Pediatrics, and the APA’s Public Policy and Advocacy Award. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academies’ Forum for Children’s Well-Being. She graduated from Brown University’s Program in Medicine, completed a pediatrics residency and chief residency at the University of California, San Francisco, earned an M.P.H. in epidemiology and preventive medicine residency from the University of California, Berkeley, and completed a fellowship in academic general pediatrics at the University of Massachusetts.
JOSHUA GOODMAN (he/him/his) is associate professor of education and economics at Boston University (BU), where he works on the economics of education policy. His research applies casual inference methods to large quantitative data sets in order to provide rigorous evidence on the impacts of education policies, particularly with respect to postsecondary education, STEM coursework, and more recently the COVID-19 pandemic. His work has been published in peer-reviewed outlets such as The Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review: Insights, and the Journal of Labor Economics. He is cited in multiple White House reports, and featured by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and National Public Radio. He serves as co-editor of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management and is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Much of his policy-related work is done as a faculty affiliate of the BU Wheelock Education Policy Center. He has a B.A. in physics from Harvard University, an M.Phil. in education from Cambridge University, and a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University. Prior to starting his Ph.D., he was a public high school math teacher in Watertown, MA.
NIA HEARD-GARRIS (she/they) is a pediatrician and a physician-investigator at the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and in the Department of Pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. She examines the influence of social adversities experienced in childhood and subsequent child and adolescent health. Heard-Garris is also interested in the factors that contribute to a child’s ability to thrive despite these experiences. She received a career development award (K01) funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. Heard-Garris is an active member of the American Academy of Pediatrics and serves as the chair and founding member of the Section on Minority Health, Equity, and Inclusion. She earned her B.S. in biology from Spelman College, her M.S. in health and health care research, received her M.D. from Howard University College of Medicine, and completed a prestigious Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Fellowship at the University of Michigan.
STEPHANIE M. JONES (she/her/hers) is the Gerald S. Lesser professor in child development and education and director of the Ecological Approaches to Social Emotional Learning Laboratory at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research, anchored in prevention science, focuses on the effects of poverty and exposure to violence on social, emotional, and behavioral development from early childhood through early adolescence. Her career has centered on evaluation research addressing the impact of preschool- and elementary-level social-emotional learning interventions on behavioral and academic outcomes and classroom practices, as well as new curriculum development, implementation, and testing. Jones is also co-director (alongside Nonie Lesaux) of the Saul Zaentz Early Education Initiative and co-principal investigator of the Early Learning Study at Harvard. She serves on numerous national advisory boards and expert consultant groups related to social-emotional development, early childhood education, and child and family anti-poverty policies, including recently as a member of the Council of Distinguished Scientists for the Aspen National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development. Jones holds a B.A. from Barnard College and a Ph.D. from Yale University.
VELMA MCBRIDE MURRY (she/her/hers) holds the Lois Autrey Betts endowed chair, associate provost, Office of Research and Innovation, and University Distinguished professor in the Departments of Health Policy at Vanderbilt School of Medicine and Human and Organizational Development at Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee. Her research focuses on examining the significance of context to everyday life experiences of African American families and youth with specific consideration to processes through which racism, and other social structural stressors, cascade through families to influence parenting and family functioning, quality of life, and
developmental outcomes and adjustment among youth, including mental and physical health. McBride Murry is associate director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Clinical and Translational Research, Community Engagement Research Core, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, past president of the Society for Research on Adolescence, and president of The International Consortium of Developmental Science Societies. She was a former member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Board on Children, Youth, and Families, and currently serves on numerous other boards and governing councils, including the National Academy of Medicine’s Culture of Health; Foundation for Child Development; and Society for Research in Child Development. McBride Murry is one of the 100 elected members to the 2020 Class of the National Academy of Medicine and appointed by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to serve a 4-year term to the National Institutes of Health Advisory Mental Health Research Council. She earned her Ph.D. in human development and family studies from the University of Missouri–Columbia.
KENT MCGUIRE (he/him/his) is the program director of education at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. He leads the investments of the foundation’s teaching, learning, and open educational resources strategies, with a focus on helping all students succeed in college, work, and civic life. Previously, McGuire served as the president and CEO of the Southern Education Foundation; dean of the College of Education at Temple University and a tenured professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies; a senior vice president at the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation; an education program officer at the Pew Charitable Trusts and director of the education program at the Lilly Endowment; and as assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Education. He currently serves on the boards of the Wallace Foundation, Teacher’s College Columbia University, the Success for All Foundation, and the National Public Education Support Fund. McGuire earned his Ph.D. in public administration from the University of Colorado, an M.A. from Columbia University Teacher’s College, and a B.A. in economics from the University of Michigan.
ROBERT PYNOOS (he/him/his) is a distinguished professor in the University of California Los Angeles’ (UCLA) Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and co-director of the UCLA/Duke University National Center for Child Traumatic Stress (NCCTS). NCCTS coordinates the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration-funded National Child Traumatic Stress Network, a nation-wide network of 140 academic and community-based centers dedicated to raising the standard of care and improving access to services for traumatized youth, families, and
communities throughout the United States. He chaired a William T. Grant Foundation Consortium on Adolescent Bereavement and a MacArthur Foundation Study Group on Children’s Response to Traumatic Stress. He received the Bruno Lima Award for Excellence in Disaster Psychiatry from the American Psychiatric Association, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. He has a B.A. from Harvard College and an M.D. and M.P.H. from Columbia University, and has completed residencies in pediatrics and psychiatry.
MICHELLE SARCHE (she/her/hers) is a licensed clinical psychologist and associate professor in the Centers for American Indian and Alaska Native Health at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and Colorado School of Public Health. Sarche is a citizen of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Ojibwe. She has partnered with American Indian and Alaska Native tribes in research and evaluation related to maternal and child health and children’s development in the context of family, community, culture, and early care, education and home visiting programs and related to health and well-being across. Sarche’s work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Administration for Children and Families; current projects include the Tribal Early Childhood Research Center, the Center for Indigenous Collaboration and Learning for Home Visiting, the Multi-site Implementation Evaluation of Tribal Home Visiting project, the Native Children’s Research Exchange Network and Scholars program, the American Indian and Alaska Native Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey, and two randomized controlled trials of a culturally adapted alcohol-exposed pregnancy prevention program. Sarche is an Aspen Institute Ascend Fellow, the 2018 recipient of the National Indian Head Start Directors Association Child Advocate of the Year award, and a 2001 inductee into the Academy for Community Engaged Scholarship. Sarche obtained her B.S. in psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her M.A. and Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Loyola University—Chicago. She completed her predoctoral clinical psychology internship and a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. She also completed a 2-year certificate in psychodynamic child and adolescent psychotherapy through the Denver Psychoanalytic Institute.
FLORENCIA TORCHE (she/her/hers) is the Dunlevie Family professor in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. Torche’s scholarship examines inequality dynamics including intergenerational mobility, disparities in educational attainment, family dynamics, assortative mating, the influence of prenatal exposures on individual well-being, and inequality. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, and to the Sociological Research Association. Torche has led many large data collection projects, including the first national survey on social mobility in Chile and Mexico. Torche holds a B.A. from the Catholic University of Chile alongside an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University.
JOSEPH WRIGHT (he/him/his) is chief health equity officer of the University of Maryland Medical System. He previously served as chair of pediatrics at the Howard University College of Medicine, and senior vice president at Children’s National Hospital, both in Washington, DC. He is currently professor of health policy and management at the University of Maryland School of Public Health. Wright’s scholarly interests include injury prevention, emergency medical services for children, and the needs of underserved communities. He previously was principal investigator of the National Institutes of Health-funded DC-Baltimore Research Center on Child Health Disparities. Wright is an elected member of the Alpha Omega Alpha (medicine) and Delta Omega (public health) honor societies, the American Pediatric Society, and the Academy of Medicine of Washington. Wright chaired the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Task Force on Addressing Bias and Discrimination and is immediate past chair of the AAP Board Committee on Equity. Previous National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine service includes study committees on end-of-life care, the future of emergency care, sports-related concussions, and bullying prevention. Wright earned a B.A. from Wesleyan University, an M.D. from Rutgers University, and an M.PH. from George Washington University.
MARCI A. YBARRA (she/her/hers) is an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin Sandra Rosenbaum School of Social Work. Her research interests include poverty and inequality, social service delivery, work supports, and family well-being. Ybarra conducts quantitative analysis of administrative and longitudinal survey data in addition to qualitative analysis through participant-observation and in-depth interviewing at social service agencies. She currently investigates three different areas of social policy and how these affect economically disadvantaged families by impacting both their work and family life: welfare reform policies, child care, and social insurance provisions. Ybarra’s research primarily focuses on single low-income mother families, immigrant families, and other historically marginalized groups. Ybarra is also a faculty affiliate at University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Research on Poverty, and Center for Demography and Ecology, and the University of Notre Dame’s Lab for Economic Opportunities. Professor Ybarra earned her B.S.W. and M.S.W. with a concentration in community practice from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. She holds a Ph.D. in social work from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
STAFF AND CONSULTANTS
NATACHA BLAIN (she/her/hers) serves as the senior board director of the Board on Children, Youth, and Families and the Committee on Law and Justice at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. She has served as a supreme court fellow, chief counsel to senator Dick Durbin on the Senate Judiciary Committee, as well as lead strategic advisor for the Children’s Defense Fund’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline Campaign. Prior to joining the National Academies, Blain served as associate director/acting executive director of Grantmakers for Children, Youth and Families. There she played a critical role in helping convene and engage diverse constituencies, fostering leadership, collaboration and innovation-sharing through a network of funders committed to the enduring well-being of children, youth and families. Blain earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Allegheny University of Health Sciences and MCP – Hahnemann University (now Drexel University) respectively, and her J.D. from Villanova School of Law.
EMILY BACKES (she/her/hers) is deputy board director for the Committee on Law and Justice and Board on Children, Youth, and Families in the Division of Behavioral, Social Sciences, and Education at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She also serves as director of the Societal Experts Action Network, a network of leading individuals and institutions in social sciences fields that provides actionable responses to urgent policy questions related to the COVID-19 pandemic. In her time at the Academies, she has served as study director for the reports: Decarcerating Correctional Facilities during COVID-19: Advancing Health, Equity, and Safety; The Promise of Adolescence: Realizing Opportunity for All Youth; Birth Settings in America: Outcomes, Quality, Access, and Choice; and Transforming the Financing of Early Care and Education. Backes has also provided analytical and editorial assistance to National Academies projects on juvenile justice reform, policing, forensic science, illicit markets, science literacy, science communication, and science and human rights. She received an M.A. and B.A. in history from the University of Missouri, specializing in U.S. human rights policy and international law, and a J.D. from the University of the District of Columbia, where she represented clients as a student attorney with the Low-income Taxpayer Clinic and the Juvenile and Special Education Law Clinic.
ALEJANDRA CASILLAS (she/her/hers) is assistant professor of medicine in residence in the Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She has worked at the Geneva and
Lausanne university hospitals, and her health services research focuses on the low-income communities served by the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services. This department of health services is the second largest municipal safety net in the United States, developing digital health interventions tailored to socially complex Limited English Proficient patients. Over 2020–2021, she has been part of the NIH STOP COVID-19 CEAL alliance, and the California Get Out the Vaccine Projects. She completed her undergraduate studies at Harvard College and medical training at Harvard Medical School She finished her internal medicine and primary care residency at the University of California, San Francisco, selected as chief medical resident. Casillas was Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at UCLA, where she also received a masters’ degree at the School of Public Health.
JENNIFER APPLETON GOOTMAN (she/her/hers) is a senior program officer with the Board on Children, Youth, and Families in the Division of Behavioral, Social Sciences, and Education. She most recently served as the executive director of the DC Soccer Club, a nonprofit youth sports organization serving thousands of children and youth from across Washington, DC. Previously, Gootman was the project director of the Birth Control Initiative for The National Campaign to Prevent Teen & Unplanned Pregnancy (rebranded Power to Decide), a series of activities designed to rebuild support for and understanding of the important positive role that birth control in the lives of women and men. Gootman has worked as a senior program officer for both the Board on Children, Youth, and Families and the Food and Nutrition Board, directing several studies on topics including adolescent risk behavior, adolescent health, teen driving, food marketing to children and youth, youth development programs, and the impact of work on children and youth in low-income families. Her work has focused on child and family policy for low-income families, including welfare reform, child care, child health, youth development, teen pregnancy prevention, and youth sports. She received a B.A. in education and fine arts from the University of Southern California and a M.A. in urban public policy from The New School University.
ADAM K. JONES (he/him/his) is a research associate with the Board on Children, Youth, and Families at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Previously, he served as a senior program assistant for both the Board on Environmental Change and Society and the Board on Human-Systems Integration where he supported the Committee on Sustainability Partnerships in the U.S.-Mexico Drylands Region and the Committee on Cybersecurity Workforce of the Federal Aviation Administration for each respective board. Before joining the National Academies, Jones served on the board of the Graduate English Organization at the University of
Maryland (UMD), College Park, and as the technology chair from 2018–2019. He received his B.A. in English literature from the University of Utah, and he holds an M.A. in English language and literature with a certificate in critical theory from UMD, College Park, where his scholarship focused on 20th century and contemporary literature depicting climate change and environmental ruin.
SUNIA YOUNG (she/her/hers) is a senior program assistant with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee on Law and Justice and Board on Children, Youth, and Families. She previously worked as a case manager at a Washington, DC-based behavioral health organization. Young also interned at the Carter Center’s Mental Health Program and also with a DC-based organization that supports Asian women who have experienced domestic violence and sexual assault. Additionally, she has studied the Persian language extensively and spent the summer of 2018 in Tajikistan studying the Iranian and Tajik dialects of Persian through the U.S. Department of State. Young graduated from Davidson College with a B.S. in psychology and a minor in Arab studies.
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