Board of Directors

H. Melvin “Mel” Ming is a broadcast executive who has delivered enriching media and experiences to audiences for the past 35 years. Mel retired in 2014 from Sesame Workshop where he worked for 15 years, the last three years he was President and CEO overseeing the gold standard children’s program Sesame Street and its worldwide distribution. He previously held executive positions at the Museum of Television and Radio (now Paley Center for Media), WQED Media in Pittsburgh, WNET in New York City and NPR in Washington.

Mel was born in Bermuda and attended Temple University graduating with a B.A. in Accounting. He later served in the U. S. Army during the Vietnam War. Mel is a certified public accountant. Mel has served as an independent director of Westwood One radio and Dial Global. Mel believes that good media should inspire its users to have consistent benefits beyond mere entertainment. He is committed to the creation and distribution of media that teaches, images that inspire, and media experiences that build knowledge and skill that are life enhancing. Close.

Jill Baker has 18 years of professional experience in asset management. She has worked as an analyst for money management firms in New York City, most recently at Advent Capital Management. Her focus has been on the financial services industry. She is currently an Adjunct Fellow at Asia Business Council in Hong Kong, where she contributed to The Greening of Asia, The Business Case for Solving Asia’s Environmental Emergency by Mark L. Clifford. Ms. Baker writes on renewable energy and climate change for various publications. She obtained a B.A. in Economics from George Mason University and a M.S. in Global Finance from New York University and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Close.

Shampa Bhattacharya was most recently a senior financial analyst at Clovis Capital, an equity focused hedge fund managing investments for institutional as well as high net worth clients with peak assets of $3 billion. Prior to joining Clovis in July 2008, she was a senior analyst at Perry Capital, a New York based large multi-strategy hedge fund, from 2002-2007. Through her career she was primarily focused on making long/short equity investments within the financials sector and also worked on cross-capital structure and private equity investments. Prior to attending business school, she worked in India from 1996-2000 with two of the largest corporations there, DLF Universal, Ltd. and ITC Ltd. She has a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Jadavpur University, India, a master’s in Construction Management from School of Planning, India, and a master’s in Business from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ms. Bhattacharya also received the designation of a Chartered Financial Analyst. Close.

Dr. Cynthia García Coll is a Professor in the Clinical Ph.D. program and Associate Director of the Institutional Center for Scientific Research at Albizu University in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her research focuses on the interplay of sociocultural and biological influences on child development, with particular emphasis on at-risk and minority populations. She received her Ph.D. in Personality and Developmental Psychology from Harvard University. Dr. García Coll has served on the editorial boards of leading academic journals, including been the Senior Editor of Child Development and Developmental Psychology. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and has received Lifetime Contributions Awards from the Society for Research on Developmental Pediatrics, the Society for Research in Adolescence and the Society for Research in Child Development. She has been on the governing boards of the Society for Research in Child Development and the Foundation for Child Development, and served as member and chair of the Scholars Program at the WT Grant Foundation. Her research has been funded by NIH, the McArthur Foundation, the WT Grant Foundation, and Spencer Foundation. Close.

Since 2004 Walter K. Frye has been the Chief Financial Officer of The Leaguers, Inc., one of Newark, New Jersey’s largest social service agencies and providers of Head Start services. Mr. Frye has also been the Executive Director of Union Township Community Action Organization (UTCAO) since 2005, and the founder of Renaissance Jr. Golf, an urban gold development program serving thousands of underrepresented minority youth in NJ.

Earlier in his career Mr. Frye was Managing Partner at W Frye & Associates, CPA and Consultants and Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Frye Williams & CO CPA, which became New Jersey’s largest minority-owned firm. He has been on the accounting faculty of Fairleigh Dickinson University and Essex County College and was Senior Auditor and Tax Accountant at Deloitte & Touche.

Frye received a B.S. from Morgan State University and an M.B.A. from Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Frye is a life member of the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity. Close.

Tammy Mann currently has been involved in work at the national, state and local levels for the past 25 years focused on addressing the needs of children and families, especially those living in economic and socially challenged environments. For the past five years, Tammy has served as President and CEO of The Campagna Center, a nonprofit that provides cradle to career programs to over 2,000 children, teens and adults across the city of Alexandria. Prior to her work at The Campagna Center, she served Executive Director of the Frederick Patterson Research Institute and Deputy Executive Director at ZERO TO THREE.

In addition to serving on the board for the Foundation for Child Development, she was recently appointed to serve as the President of the Governing Board of the National Association for the Education of Young Children. She is also a member of the Board of Directors for the Alexandria Chamber of Commerce and the Buffet Early Childhood Institute. Tammy has addressed national and international audiences and authored books and articles on a wide variety of issues in the field of early childhood education and development. She is a former Public Policy Fellow with the American Psychological Association. Tammy earned her bachelor’s degree from Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia and completed her master’s and doctorate in clinical psychology, with an interdisciplinary specialization in infant studies, at Michigan State University. Currently she resides in Fairfax, Virginia. Close.

Professor McBride Murry has conducted research on African-American parents and youth for over a decade and identified proximal, malleable protective factors that deter emotional problems and risk engagement in youth. Using this information, she designed and implemented two randomized control trial, family-based preventive interventions programs, the Strong African American Families (SAAF) Program and the Pathways for African American Success (PAAS), and both have demonstrated efficacy in the enhancement of parenting and family processes as well as youths’ intrapersonal protective processes that, in turn, dissuaded youth from engaging in health compromising behaviors. A unique aspect of the PAAS program was the testing of technology as an alternative delivery modality for disseminating evidence-based programs in rural communities. Similar to SAAF, PAAS intervention effects were effective in delaying/deterring substance use and other risky behaviors by influencing parenting practices and youth protective factors (i.e. cognitive and emotional self-regulation), with greater programmatic effects demonstrated among families receiving the program via technology delivery format.  Her most research work focuses on merging neuroscience and prevention science to examine effects of PAAS on risk-taking/cognitive-control neural circuits and assess whether changes in these circuits correlate with changes in youth protective factors (i.e. improving self-regulation). Professor McBride Murry’s overarching goal is to disseminate her evidence-based preventive intervention programs for uptake in community-based organizations, as well as schools and primary health care settings and in faith-based organizations, and examine their efficacy and effectiveness in real-world settings.

Professor McBride Murry’s teaching has included, Diverse Populations, a graduate course to promote awareness of ways  which social injustice imposed on subpopulations of individuals, families, and communities perpetuates disadvantage and disparities, and Human Development and Prevention Science, designed to provide an interdisciplinary overview of prevention theories, research, and practice, as well as expand students’ understanding of the interconnectedness of context and human development to the design, development, and implementation of preventive intervention programs.

Professor McBride Murry is co-chair of Vanderbilt University Chancellor’s Appointed Mental Health and Well-Being Strategic Planning Committee, Peabody Faculty Council, and serves on several advisory boards and governing councils, including National Academy of Science, Society for Research on Child Development.  She is also on numerous editorial boards, including Journal of Child Development, Journal of Developmental Psychology, Journal of Applied Developmental Science, Journal of Family Psychology, Journal of Prevention Science

Professor McBride Murry is the Associate Director, Clinical Translational Science Award Community Engagement Core Close.

Joseph Tobin is the Elizabeth Garrard Hall Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Georgia. He has previously taught at Arizona State University, University of Hawaii, and the University of New Hampshire and is an AERA Fellow. His research interests include cross-cultural studies of early childhood education, immigration and education, children and the media, preschool teaching expertise, and qualitative research methods and especially video-based methods for studying young children, preschool teachers, and preschools. He has led four multinational research projects on preschools, with significant funding from the Spencer Foundation and the Bernard van Leer Foundation and supervised 30 doctoral students, some of whom are now professors of early childhood education at research universities. Tobin’s books include Preschool in Three Cultures (Yale University Press, 1989); Making a Place for Pleasure in Early Childhood Education (Yale University Press, 1993); Pikachu’s Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon (Duke University Press, 2000); Good Guys Don’t Wear Hats: Children’s Talk about the Media (Teachers College Press, 2003); Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited (University of Chicago Press, 2009); Children Crossing Borders: Immigrant Parents and Teacher Perspectives on Preschool for Children of Immigrants (2013); Teaching Embodied: Japanese Preschool Teaching as Cultural Practice (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Preschool and Im/migrants in Five Countries (Peter Lang, 2016). His current research projects include “Deaf Kindergarten’s in Three Countries: France, Japan, and the United States” and “The Development of Expertise in Preschool Teachers in Three Cultures: Japan, China, and the United States.” Close.