Human Capital Research Collaborative
Fall Conference

Health and Early Childhood Development: The Impact of Health on School Readiness and Other Education Outcomes

October 14 and 15, 2010
Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

• Conference home
• Agenda
• Speakers

About the Speakers

Jean Abraham, School of Public Health, University of Minnesota

Jean Abraham is an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health’s Division of Health Policy & Management. She focuses the majority of her time on analyzing the access to and cost of employer-based health insurance for workers and families. She also examines the behavioral effects of employee wellness programs and hospital market competition issues. Her current research interests include household decision-making with respect to employer-based health insurance, welfare analysis of health care choice, and employer health benefit design. She is also well-versed in various national health care reform initiatives. Abraham graduated from the University of Arizona with a B.A. in economics and political science and earned a Ph.D. in public policy analysis and management from Carnegie Melon University.

Catherine Ayoub, Harvard Medical School

Catherine Ayoub is associate professor at Harvard Medical School and co-directs the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Master’s program in risk and prevention. She is a developmental and licensed counseling psychologist with research and practice interests in the impact of childhood trauma across the life span, and the development and implementation of prevention and intervention systems to combat risk and promote resilience with emphasis on young children. She leads ongoing research in prevention and intervention systems for young at-risk children, including leadership in the evaluation of children and families in Early Head Start and families with depression. Ayoub holds an Ed.D. from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education.

Karen Bierman, Pennsylvania State University

Karen Bierman is a distinguished professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University. She has research interests in child clinical psychology, social-emotional development, and preventive interventions. Her research focuses on peer relations, disruptive behavior problems, and intervention programs to facilitate social adjustment. She currently directs, among a host of other projects and initiatives, the Head Start-REDI project, a field trial evaluating the impact of research-based emergent literacy and social-emotional skill training on student school readiness when delivered in the context of Head Start programs. Bierman holds a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Denver.

Paula Braveman, University of California, San Francisco

Paula Braveman is a professor of family and community medicine and director of the Center on Social Disparities in Health at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research areas include socioeconomic and racial or ethnic disparities in health, translating research into information to inform policies, and methodological and conceptual issues in studying socioeconomic and racial or ethnic inequalities in health. Her work has been published in several journals, including the American Journal of Public Health. Braveman received a B.A. in philosophy from Swarthmore College; an M.D. from the University of California, San Francisco; and an M.P.H. in epidemiology from the University of California, Berkeley.

Robert Bruininks, University of Minnesota

Robert Bruininks is the president of the University of Minnesota. He has served the University of Minnesota for 39 years, formerly as professor, dean, executive vice president, and provost. With a focus on child and adolescent development and policy research, he has authored or co-authored nearly 90 journal articles and more than 70 book chapters as well as training materials and several standardized tests. Bruininks earned his B.A. from Western Michigan University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from George Peabody College (now Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development).

Greg Duncan, University of California, Irvine

Greg Duncan is a distinguished professor of education at the University of California, Irvine. His works have been extensively published on issues of income distribution, child poverty, and welfare dependence. He is co-author with Aletha Huston and Tom Eisner of Higher Ground: New Hope for the Working Poor and Their Children (2007) and has contributed to a number of other publications in a similar genre. He also was the principal investigator of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics project at the University of Michigan for 13 years. He was recently elected president of the Society for Research in Child Development for 2009-2011. Duncan holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan.

Mary Jane England, Regis College

Mary Jane England is the president of Regis College in Weston, Mass. In addition, she serves on the board of directors of Healthways, Inc., a Tennessee-based company focused on reducing health care costs through a variety of risk management strategies.  She is a member of the Coordinating Council of the Coalition for Healthier Cities and Communities in the United States, National Academy of Sciences, National Science Foundation International, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Advisory Committee, among others, and serves on dozens of boards of professional organizations. England has a medical degree from the Boston University School of Medicine.

Martin S. Gaynor, Carnegie Mellon University

Martin Gaynor is the E.J. Barone Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University’s H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass., and the Centre for Market and Public Organization at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. His research focuses on competition in health care markets and on the role of incentive structures within health care. Gaynor has a Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University.

Michael Georgieff, University of Minnesota

Michael Georgieff is a professor of pediatrics and child psychology and the director of the Division of Neonatology at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on fetal and neonatal nutrition. Specifically, it focuses on the effect of fetal and neonatal iron nutrition on brain development and neurocognitive function. He has been published in numerous journals, including American Journal of Physiology, Pediatric Research, Journal of Nutrition and Journal of Pediatrics. Georgieff earned his M.D. from Washington University in St. Louis.

Bernard Guyer, Johns Hopkins

Bernard Guyer is the Zanvyl Kreiger Professor of Children’s Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. His preferred research areas include child and maternal health solutions aimed at immunization against vaccine-preventable diseases, child injury reduction, infant mortality, and strengthened human development during the early part of the lifespan. He has received a number of awards for his work, including the David Rall Medal from the Institute of Medicine for his distinguished leadership as chair of a study committee. Guyer earned his medical degree from the University of Rochester.

Samuel Kleiner, Cornell University

Samuel Kleiner is an assistant professor at Cornell University. His primary research focus is health economics and health policy using applied microeconomics. Kleiner holds a B.A. in mathematical methods in the social sciences and economics from Northwestern University, an M.A. in economics from Brown University, and a Ph.D. in applied economics and policy analysis from Carnegie Mellon University.

Narayana Kocherlakota, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

Narayana Kocherlakota is president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Prior to his appointment at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, he was at varying times a professor of economics at the University of Minnesota, where he previously chaired the economics department, a consultant to and research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, a professor at Stanford University, and a staff member of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has been published in several economic journals, including Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, and Journal of Economic Theory. Kocherlakota earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago and an A.B. in mathematics from Princeton.

Laurie T. Martin, Rand Corporation

Laurie Martin is a policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit firm dedicated to improving policy and decision-making through research and analysis. She focuses her research on health disparities, health literacy, and the relationship between education and health. Martin earned a Sc.D. from the Harvard School of Public Health.

Arthur Reynolds, Human Capital Research Collaborative, University of Minnesota

Arthur Reynolds is a co-director for the Human Capital Research Collaborative and professor at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development. In addition, he is director of the Chicago Longitudinal Study, a 24-year project that tracks the life-course development of 1,500 children who attended early childhood programs in inner-city Chicago. The study examines the effects of intervention on education, economic well-being, health, mental health, and family outcomes. He is published in several journals, including Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis and the Children and Youth Services Review. Reynolds has a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Art Rolnick, Human Capital Research Collaborative, University of Minnesota

Art Rolnick serves as a co-director for the Human Capital Research Collaborative at the University of Minnesota. He previously served at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis as a senior vice president and the director of research and as an associate economist with the Federal Open Market Committee – the monetary policymaking body for the Federal Reserve System. He is a board member of several Minneapolis nonprofit firms, including the Minnesota Early Learning Foundation and Ready 4 K, an advocacy organization for early childhood development. A recipient of numerous awards for his work in early childhood development, he was named Minnesotan of the Year by Minnesota Monthly magazine in 2005. Rolnick holds degrees in mathematics and economics from Wayne State University and has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Minnesota.

Jack P. Shonkoff, Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Graduate School of Education

Jack Shonkoff is the Julius B. Richmond FAMRI Professor of Child Health and Development at the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Graduate School of Education, and the founding director of the universitywide Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. He also chairs the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, a multi-university collaboration composed of leading scholars in neuroscience, developmental psychology, pediatrics, and economics. In addition, he is the co-editor of Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development. Shonkoff earned his medical degree from New York University.

Dianne Stanton Ward, University of North Carolina in Greensboro

Dianne Stanton Ward is a professor in the Department of Nutrition in the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she has been for the past 12 years; prior to that she was on the faculty in the School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina. She also serves as the co-director of the doctoral program in the same department and as the associate director of the Clinical Nutrition Research Center’s Nutrition Epidemiology Core. Her research focuses on the prevention of obesity and the promotion of healthy diets and physical activity through interventions implemented in schools, communities, and homes. Ward holds an Ed.D. in physical education from the University of North Carolina in Greensboro.