Professor McBride Murry’s research focuses on examining the significance of context to everyday life experiences of African American families and youth; specific consideration is given to the implications of racism and other social structural stressors that marginalize families, for cascading influences on parenting and family functioning, mental and physical health, quality of life, and developmental outcomes and adjustment among youth. She has translated research from longitudinal research studies to inform the design, development and implementation of two RCTs to test their efficacy in youth risk behavior engagement. These programs, The Strong African American Families (SAAF) and the Pathways for African Americans Success (PAAS), not only prevented high risk behaviors but also demonstrated spillover effects on the enhancement of several educational-related outcomes among youth as they transition from middle childhood through high school.

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. She is President of the Society for Research on Adolescence (2020-2022), serves on boards of directors and governing councils, including the National Academy of Medicine, and holds positions on numerous editorial boards. Close.

Marilou Hyson is a national and international consultant on early child development and education.  She focuses on young children’s social and emotional development and has examined early childhood educational interventions and policies, emphasizing teacher professional development as a strategy for improving early learning environments and outcomes.

Internationally, Marilou has been a senior advisor to UNICEF, the World Bank, and Save the Children, supporting work in countries including Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Rwanda. She has advised on the development of teacher competency standards; the design and evaluation of professional development programs for teachers in low-income rural areas; and digital resources to support families with young children in Europe and Central Asia.

After serving as Professor and Chair of the University of Delaware’s Department of Individual and Family Studies, Marilou was Associate Executive Director for Professional Development at the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). Marilou previously served as editor-in-chief of Early Childhood Research Quarterly and co-chaired SRCD’s Policy and Communications Committee. She received a Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College in child development and early childhood education and was an SRCD Fellow in the US Department of Education. Close.

Virginia Klein has over 20 years of experience delivering investments, with a focus on alternative investments, to institutional and high-net-worth investors. Virginia joined Lombard International in 2015 and is Executive Vice President and Head of the Investments function, which includes asset manager origination, onboarding, relationship management, and due diligence. She is Chairperson of the Investment Committee, an Executive Committee member, and sits on the Board for Lombard International Distribution company.

Prior to Lombard, she spent 10 years in the Alternative Investments Group at Merrill Lynch Wealth Management in New York, where she was a Director of Origination & Product Management for hedge funds as well as Head of Innovation for the Alternative Investments Group. Virginia held a similar role in the private equity and real assets group prior to joining the hedge fund group. She received her B.A. in Political Science from Clemson University and her MBA from the McDonough School at Georgetown University. Close.

Salvatore LaSpada is an internationally recognized leader in strategic philanthropy. As Founder and CEO of Alchemy Philanthropy, he works with foundations in designing governance, developing strategy, assessing impact, and managing inter-generational leadership transitions.

Prior to establishing Alchemy, he served as founding Executive Director of a foundation established by the Royal Family of Abu Dhabi focused on early childhood education from 2011 to 2015. His previous philanthropic affiliations include the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation (Brazil Office), and the MacArthur Foundation. He also served as a philanthropic advisor to the Rockefeller Family. At the center of his work is The Philanthropy Workshop, the world’s premiere donor education program and network for Foundation trustees, which he led from 1999 to 2011, first at the Rockefeller Foundation and then as Chief Executive at the Institute for Philanthropy (London and New York).

Dr. LaSpada was a Trustee of Zennström Philanthropies (London) and currently serves as a Trustee of the Raymond and Gloria Naftali Foundation (New York). He is the former Chair of the Hetrick-Martin Institute and Hispanics in Philanthropy, and served on the advisory committee of the Global Equity Initiative at Harvard University. He was an Eisenhower Fellow in Argentina, a visiting lecturer at the University of Bologna’s Masters in International Studies in Philanthropy program (2004-2008), and a Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics (2010). He was a Fellow at the London-based Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts/RSA from 2009 to 2011 and is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Dr. LaSpada holds a B.A. in Classics (Ancient Greek and Latin) from Haverford College, an M.A. in Communications from Temple University, and an M.Ed. and Ed.D. in International Education and Development from Columbia University. Close.

Vivian Tseng joined the Foundation for Child Development as President and CEO in 2022. Prior to the Foundation, Dr. Tseng served as Senior Vice President, Programs at the William T. Grant Foundation where she led initiatives to connect research, policy, and practice. She is widely recognized for her leadership role in building an interdisciplinary field of research on research use in policy and practice, expanding research-practice partnerships across the country, and supporting a broader movement to democratize evidence. She regularly speaks to international and domestic audiences on evidence-informed policy and practice. Her research on racial, cultural, and immigration influences on child development have been published in Child Development and her research on promoting social change through research and philanthropy have appeared in the American Journal of Community Psychology, American Psychologist, and Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. Dr. Tseng’s career reflects an abiding commitment to racial equity. She has fostered greater equity in grantmaking, developed funding programs to support young researchers of color and nonprofit leaders from racially minoritized and LGBTQ communities, and mentored countless junior colleagues throughout her career.

Dr. Tseng received her Ph.D. from NYU and her B.A. from UCLA and serves on the Boards of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy (Board Chair), Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees, and the Federation of Associations in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences (Board Secretary). Close.

LaRue Allen is the Weiss Professor of Applied Psychology and Vice Dean for Faculty Affairs at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University.

She was Chair of the Committee on the Science of Children Birth to Age 8, which was convened by the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. In 2015, the Committee released its report entitled Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth through Age 8: A Unifying Foundation.  She chaired a follow-up committee that produced the 2018 report Transforming the Financing of Early Care and Education, that focused on how to fund early care and education for children from birth to kindergarten entry that is affordable to families, and of high quality, including a well-qualified and adequately supported workforce. Dr. Allen is currently chairing the National Academies committee on Measuring the Opportunity Gap from Birth to Age Eight, a study on the causes and consequences of the opportunity gap for young children from birth to age eight.

Dr. Allen has been a member of the Head Start Governing Board for the New York City Department of Education since 2019, and member of the Expert Advisory Committee (EAC) of the Early Childhood Workforce Investment Initiative (EC WIIN), Foundation for Child Development, since 2018.  She served as a member of the Young Scholars Program Advisory Committee of the Foundation for Child Development from 2014-2018, which she chaired from 2019 to 2022.

She received her PhD in clinical/community/developmental psychology from Yale University. Close.

Gregg Auerbach provides a sound investment approach for ultra-high-net-worth individuals, families and nonprofits to help them achieve their investment goals. He joined J.B. Hanauer & Co. in 1991 — it became RBC Wealth Management in 2009. He provides comprehensive wealth management, identifies clients’ investment objectives and performs individualized client portfolio construction. Gregg assists clients in understanding their risk profile by providing intelligent investment advice founded on fundamental investment principles. Then he helps clients in developing an appropriate investment portfolio.

Gregg is proud to use the Certified Portfolio Manager title from the Academy of Certified Portfolio Managers (ACPM). The CPM® program included extensive coursework and examination, followed by a five-day seminar at Columbia University led by internationally recognized professors. The CPM® curriculum involves indepth study of fundamental analysis, option valuation, foreign currency exchange, credit default swap structure and valuation analysis, and asset allocation. Gregg is among more than 350 individuals who attained this certification, establishing himself as a forerunner in portfolio management.

Gregg earned his doctorate in dental surgery from the University of Medicine and Pharmacy Carol Davila and is fluent in English, Hebrew, and Romanian languages. Close.

As an educator and administrator in public schools, Dr. Alejandra Barraza has consistently challenged the narratives of stigma related to underserved, immigrant, and minority children by building a culture and vision of excellence — one in which children understand that a trajectory for high school graduation and post-secondary education is the collective goal. With a focus on the process rather than product of learning, Dr. Barraza advocates for learning through play in an educational climate that too often undermines this practice in early childhood classrooms.

Dr. Barraza earned her doctoral degree in curriculum instruction, with a concentration in early childhood education, at the University of Texas at Austin. She continued to work full-time as she pursued her doctorate, which allowed her the unique opportunity to bridge theory and practice. As part of her doctoral work, she interned at the U.S. Department of Education at the time the DOE was in the process of establishing the Office of Early Learning. This experience gave her the opportunity to understand education policy at the national level. Close.

Lynn A. Karoly is a RAND senior economist whose research has focused on the well-being of children, youth, and families; human capital investments from birth to adulthood; economic disparities; social welfare policy; and labor market behavior. Much of her recent research has focused on early care and education (ECE) programs, with studies on the use and quality of ECE programs, the system of publicly subsidized ECE programs, professional development for the ECE workforce, ECE quality rating and improvement systems, and ECE program cost and financing. Another area of her expertise is the application of benefit-cost analysis (BCA) and related tools such as cost analysis and cost-effectiveness analysis to social programs, with recent analyses of the economic returns to early childhood interventions and youth development programs. Other research has examined issues pertaining to poverty, inequality, immigration, welfare reform, self-employment, and retirement.

In addition to her research, Karoly served as director of RAND’s Office of Research Quality Assurance from 2004 to 2014 and director of RAND Labor and Population from 1995 to 2003. Her professional service includes roles as the 2017 president of the Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis and editorial positions for the Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis and The Journal of Human Resources. She was as a member of the National Academies of Sciences (NAS) Committee on Financing Early Care and Education with a Highly Qualified Workforce and previously served on the NAS committee that produced Advancing the Power of Economic Evidence to Inform Investments in Children, Youth, and Families (2016). Karoly received her Ph.D. in economics from Yale University. Close.

William Moon is Carnegie Corporation of New York’s vice president and chief financial officer (CFO), responsible for working with senior management and the endowment’s in-house investment team to oversee all accounting, budgeting, and financial reporting.

Prior to joining the Corporation, he served as CFO at the Russell Sage Foundation for four years, the latest in a series of strategic financial management positions he has held in the nonprofit sector. Before assuming the CFO position at the Russell Sage Foundation, Moon held financial and accounting roles at nonprofits such as the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, the College Board, and Jazz at Lincoln Center. A certified public accountant in the state of New York, he began his career at PricewaterhouseCoopers, working with a wide range of for-profit companies and nonprofit organizations.

Moon earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting and an MBA at Binghamton University – State University of New York. 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.