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.

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.

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.

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.

LaRue Allen currently holds the position of Weiss Professor of Applied Psychology and previously served as 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.

Linda M. Burton’s program of research integrates ethnographic, neuroscience, developmental, and demographic approaches and examines the roles that inequality, poverty, and intergenerational family dynamics play in life course transitions of children, adolescents, and adults in urban and rural families.

She engages in “big science” research and directed the ethnographic component of Welfare, Children, and Families:  A Three-City Study and a multi-site team ethnographic study (Family Life Project) of poverty, family processes, and child development in six rural communities.

She also has served as Dean of Social Sciences and Director of the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University, and has held leadership positions on numerous boards, councils, and committees including the Committee on the Science of Research on Families for the Institute of Medicine and the Board of Directors for the Family Process Institute.  Dean Burton is a Fellow in the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare and was inducted into the Sociological Research Association. She served as President of the Association from 2017 to 2018.  She also is highly invested in mentoring young scholars and creating innovative and sustainable pathways for advancing the impact of their research, scholarship, and practice in the areas of poverty, child and family development, and public policy. Close.

Barbara Chow is the director of the Education program at the Heising-Simons Foundation. Prior to joining the Foundation, she completed an eight-year term as the director of the Education program for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Before that, Barbara was the policy director of the House Budget Committee and the executive director of the National Geographic Education Foundation. During the Clinton administration, she served as deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council, associate director for Education, Income Maintenance, and Labor programs at the Office of Management and Budget, and special assistant to the president for White House Legislative Affairs. Previously, she also worked for the Senate Democratic Policy Committee and the Senate Budget Committee. Barbara earned a master’s degree in public policy from the University of California, Berkeley, and a bachelor’s degree in government from Pomona College. Close.

Fabienne Doucet is executive director of the NYU Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools and Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education and Urban Education in the department of Teaching & Learning at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. She is an affiliated faculty member of the NYU Institute for Human Development and Social Change and Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Born in Spain, raised in Haiti, and migrating to the U.S. at the age of ten, Doucet embodies a hybrid identity that is mirrored in her interdisciplinary approach to examining how immigrant and U.S.-born children of color and their families navigate education in the United States. A critical ethnographer, Doucet studies how taken-for-granted beliefs, practices, and values in the U.S. educational system position linguistically, culturally, and socioeconomically diverse children and families at a disadvantage, and seeks active solutions for meeting their educational needs. She is co-editor of the book Ethnocultural Diversity and the Home-to-School Link (Springer, 2021) with Christine McWayne and Susan Sheridan. Doucet has published in numerous journals including Child Development, Teachers College Record, Anthropology and Education Quarterly. She currently serves on multiple national editorial and advisory boards and lectures nationally on issues of equity, anti-racism, and humanizing research and practice. Doucet has a Ph.D. in Human Development and Family Studies from UNC-Greensboro and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education with fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation. 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.

Marissa Tirona is president of Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees, where she leads the organization’s efforts to move money and power to immigrant and refugee communities and galvanizes funders to resource a robust immigration and refugee rights power-building ecosystem. Previously, she was a program officer at the Ford Foundation, where she managed a multi-issue, multi-country portfolio as part of the BUILD initiative, Ford’s flagship program designed to strengthen organizations and networks core to the global social justice infrastructure. Before joining Ford, Marissa led the Blue Shield of California Foundation’s programmatic, policy, and grantmaking efforts to address, prevent, and ultimately end domestic violence and promote health equity throughout the state. Prior to that, she was senior project director at CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, where she led comprehensive, multiyear leadership initiatives. Earlier in her career, Marissa served as program director of the National Employment Lawyers Association and, before that, as an employment attorney at two national law firms. Marissa currently serves on the boards of the Foundation for Child Development, United Philanthropy Forum, Change Elemental and Sadie Nash Leadership Project. She holds a J.D. from Santa Clara University School of Law, is a member of the California State Bar, and has a B.A. in English literature with a concentration in women’s studies from Swarthmore College. Close.

Tracy Zimmerman is Vice President, Policy and Communications at the Neimand Collaborative, a social impact marketing firm. She is a nationally recognized leader working at the nexus of policy, advocacy, and communications whose work in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and her contributions to early childhood education initiatives have earned her accolades.

She previously served as Deputy Secretary for Policy and Communications at the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. Tracy also co-founded the North Carolina Early Childhood Foundation, where she built a statewide Pathways to Grade-Level Reading framework to develop shared measures and strategies to support children’s optimal development.

Over her career, Tracy has worked for and on behalf of numerous public interest organizations including Planned Parenthood of Maryland, the National Cooperative Bank, Education Commission of the States, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. Close.