Appendix C
Biographical Sketches of Panel Members and Staff
GREG J. DUNCAN (Chair) is distinguished professor of education at the University of California, Irvine. Previously, he was a professor at the University of Michigan and director of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. He was a member of the 2008 Panel to Review the National Children’s Study Research Plan. His recent work has focused on estimating the role of school-entry skills and behaviors on later school achievement and attainment and the effects of increasing income inequality on schools and children’s life chances. He has served as president of the Population Association of America and of the Society for Research in Child Development. He received the 2013 Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize of the Jacobs Foundation, given for scientific work of high social relevance to the personality development of children and young people. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan.
DEAN B. BAKER is professor of medicine, pediatrics, and epidemiology in the School of Medicine and director of the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health at the University of California at Irvine. He was a former principal investigator at one of the Vanguard Study locations of the National Children’s Study. His research interests include environmental epidemiology, with, an emphasis on children’s environmental health, including developmental toxicity associated with exposures to heavy metals and pesticides, and environmental factors in asthma; and occupational epidemiology with an emphasis on role of work organization and stress in the etiology of cardiovascular disease. He is a former president of the International Society for Environmental Epi-
demiology. He is a recipient of the Kehoe Award for Excellence in Education and Research by the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. He has an M.D. from the University of California at San Diego and a M.P.H. in epidemiology from the University of California at Berkeley.
PAUL P. BIEMER is a distinguished fellow in statistics at RTI International and associate director for survey research and director of the certificate program in survey methodology at the Odum Institute for Research in Social Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also directs the Center of Excellence in Complex Data Analysis at RTI. His work focuses on survey design and analysis, general survey methodology, and nonsampling error modeling and evaluation. Among his honors, he has received the H.O. Hartley Award, the Morris Hansen Award, and the Roger Herriot Award for excellence in statistical research. He is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the International Statistics Institute. He has a Ph.D. in statistics from Texas A&M University.
BARBARA LEPIDUS CARLSON is associate director of statistics at Mathematica Policy Research. Her work focuses on both sampling and survey direction, predominantly in the fields of health care and early childhood education, including a number of studies of Head Start. Her work focuses on sample design and implementation, creating sampling and analysis weights, calculating response rates, estimating design effects, and ensuring overall data quality. In addition, she is responsible for producing technical documentation of the methodology using language that is understandable by nonstatisticians. She has also directed a number of survey projects at Mathematica, including several rounds of the Community Tracking Study Household Survey (now known as the Health Tracking Household Survey) and the Evaluation of the Cash and Counseling Demonstration. She has an M.A. in mathematics/statistics from Boston University.
ANA V. DIEZ-ROUX is dean of the Drexel University School of Public Health. Previously, she held several positions at the School of Public Health of the University of Michigan, including professor and chair of epidemiology, director of the Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health, director of the Center for Integrative Approaches to Health Disparities, research professor in the Survey Research Center of the Institute for Social Research, and director of the Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholars Program. Her research interests include social epidemiology, neighborhood health effects, cardiovascular disease epidemiology, air pollution and cardiovascular risk, multilevel analysis, racial and ethnic disparities, and systems approaches
in population health. She is a member of the Institute of Medicine. She has an M.D. from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and an M.P.H. and Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health.
NANCY J. KIRKENDALL (Study Director) is a senior program officer for the Committee on National Statistics. Previously, she served as director of the Statistics and Methods Group of the Energy Information Administration (EIA) and a member of EIA’s senior staff. She also served as senior mathematical statistician in the Statistical Policy Branch of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, serving as the desk officer for the U.S. Census Bureau and chair of the Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology. She is a fellow and past vice president of the American Statistical Association and a past president of the Washington Statistical Society. She is a recipient of the American Statistical Association’s Roger Herriot Award for innovation in federal statistics and its Founder’s Award. She has a Ph.D. in mathematical statistics from George Washington University.
VIRGINIA M. LESSER is professor and currently chair in the Department of Statistics at Oregon State University. She has served as the Director of the Oregon State University Survey Research Center since 1993. Her research interests include sampling, survey methodology, environmental statistics, and applied statistics. Her current research projects include investigations to compare response rates, costs, and errors in single-mode vs. multi-mode surveys. She is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association. She has a doctorate in public health in biostatistics from the University of North Carolina.
MARIE C. McCORMICK is Sumner and Esther Feldberg professor of maternal and child health in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the Harvard School of Public Health, where she was formerly chair of the Department of Maternal and Child Health. She is also professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, senior associate for academic affairs in the Department of Neonatology at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and senior associate director of the Infant Follow-up Program at Children’s Hospital. Her research involves epidemiological and health services research investigations in areas related to infant mortality and the outcomes of high-risk neonates. Her current research projects include outcomes of infants experiencing neonatal complications (such as low birth weight) and interventions to ameliorate adverse outcomes; evaluation of programs designed to improve the health of families and children; and maternal health and prematurity. She is a member of the Institute of Medicine. She has an M.D. from the Johns Hopkins Medical School and a Sc.D. from the Bloomberg School of Public Health of Johns Hopkins University.
SARA S. MCLANAHAN is the William S. Tod professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. She is the founding director of the Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing and a principal investigator of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. She was chair of a steering committee that organized a workshop held in 2013 to review the National Children’s Study research plan. Her research interests include family demography, poverty and inequality, and social policy. She is a past president of the Population Association of America and has served on the boards of the American Sociological Association, the Population Association of America, and the Institute of Medicine’s Board on Children, Youth, and Families. She currently serves on the board of the Russell Sage Foundation. She was named the James S. Coleman fellow of the American Academy of Political Science, and she is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. She has a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin.
GEORGE R. SAADE is professor of obstetrics and gynecology, chief of obstetrics and maternal-fetal medicine, and director of the Perinatal Research Division at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. He is also a professor of cell biology and directs a laboratory with a focus on maternal-fetal physiology and developmental programming of adult diseases. His clinical interests are in hypertensive disorders in pregnancy, preterm labor, and medical complication of pregnancy. He was a member of the National Children’s Study pregnancy and infant group when it was under development. He is a past president of the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine. He is a fellow of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. He has an M.D. from the American University of Beirut.
S. LYNNE STOKES is a professor in the Department of Statistical Science at Southern Methodist University. She was previously a staff member at the U.S. Bureau of the Census, where she worked on measurement of interviewer errors for the Current Population Survey. Her current research interests include sampling and nonsampling error modeling, psychometrics, and capture-recapture methodology. She is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and a recipient of ASA’s Founder’s Award. She is a member of the technical advisory committee for the Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress. She has a Ph.D. in mathematical statistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
LEONARDO TRASANDE is associate professor in pediatrics and environmental medicine at the School of Medicine and in health policy at the Wagner School of Public Service, both at New York University. His research focuses on identifying the role of environmental and other factors in chronic childhood disease and documenting the economic costs for policy makers of failing to
prevent them proactively. He has focused particularly on the costs of children’s exposure to chemicals in the environment, on increases in hospitalizations associated with childhood obesity, and on increases in medical expenditures associated with being obese or overweight in childhood. He serves on the Environment Programme Steering Committee of the United Nations, which is developing a global outlook on chemicals policy, and on the executive committee of the Council for Environmental Health of the American Academy of Pediatrics. He recently served on the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Center for Environmental Health at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He served on the Steering Committee of the National Children’s Study from 2005-2011. He has an M.P.P. from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School.
