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.

Andrew D. Racine, M.D., Ph.D. is the Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer of the Montefiore Medical Center and Director of the Montefiore Medical Group. He has appointments as Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (AECOM) and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in Manhattan.

Dr. Racine holds combined degrees in medicine and economics having received his M.D. and Ph.D. from New York University as a National Research Service Award scholar from 1975-1983. He subsequently trained in pediatrics at the Boston Children’s Hospital before returning to New York City to serve on the faculty of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. In 1992, Dr. Racine was recruited from Columbia to become the Associate Director of the Division of General Pediatrics at AECOM. He served as Director of the Division of General Pediatrics from 1997 until August of 2012 when he assumed his new positions. His research collaborations at the NBER have involved the impact of a variety of public health programs on child health. He has also been heavily involved in child health advocacy at the national level with the American Academy of Pediatrics and serves on the AAP’s national Committee on Child Health Financing. Close.

Dr. Eugene García is Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University and the University of California, Berkeley. He served as Professor and Vice President for Education Partnerships at ASU from 2006-2011 and as Dean of the Mary Lou Fulton College of Education from 2002-2006. He joined ASU from the University of California, Berkeley where he was Professor and Dean of the Graduate School of Education (1995-2001).

García has served as an elected member of a local school board and a Senior Officer in the US Department of Education. He has published extensively in areas of early learning, bilingual development and equal educational opportunity. His most recent books include; Early Education of Dual Language Learners (2010), edited with E. Frede; Cognition, Bilingualism and Education (2011) with Jose Nanez; and, Understanding the Language Development and Early Education of Hispanic Children (2012) with Erminda García. He serves on the National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine, Board on Children Youth and Families, and, the Board of Trustees for the Center for Applied Linguistics., 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.

Vivian L. Gadsden is the William T. Carter Professor of Child Development and Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Gadsden is also on the faculties of Africana Studies and of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies; serves as director of the National Center on Fathers and Families; and served as associate director of the National Center on Adult Literacy. Dr. Gadsden’s research and scholarly interests focus on children and families across the life-course, from early childhood through the aging process, particularly children and families at the greatest risk for academic and social vulnerability by virtue of race, gender, ethnicity, poverty, and immigrant status. Her conceptual framework, family cultures, has been used widely to examine the interconnectedness among families’ political, cultural, and social histories and racialized identities; social practices; and literacy processes. Her current, collaborative projects include studies of Head Start children’s literacy learning and teacher communities (the EPIC study), family engagement, and parent involvement; young fathers in urban settings; health and educational disparities within low-income communities; children of incarcerated parents; and intergenerational learning within African-American and Latino families.

In addition to serving on the Board of the Foundation for Child Development, she has served or serves on foundation and Congressionally-mandated review committees, including the Foundation for Child Development’s Young Scholars Program, the Spencer Foundation where she was a Resident Fellow, and a panel of the National Academy of Sciences. She has held leadership roles in the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the Society for Research in Child Development. Dr. Gadsden also serves on several journal editorial boards and is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Educational Researcher, published by AERA. She has published numerous journal articles, book chapters, texts, and reports, including booklength volumes on literacy and African American youth; re-entry of incarcerated parents in the lives of children, families, and communities; and risk, equity, and schooling as well as a forthcoming book volume on children of incarcerated parents. Dr. Gadsden is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association. Close.

Marilou Hyson is a national and international consultant on early child development and education and is adjunct professor at the University of Massachusetts — Boston. Her work focuses on young children’s social and emotional development and has included both basic research and the study of educational interventions and policies, emphasizing teacher professional development as a strategy for improving early learning environments and outcomes.

Internationally, Marilou has worked with the World Bank and Save the Children in Vietnam, Indonesia, Timor-Leste, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Papua New Guinea, and Rwanda. She has advised on the development of standards for child outcomes and teacher competencies; helped to design teacher professional development programs; and assisted in the design of program evaluations of teacher training improvement projects in low-income rural areas.

After serving as Professor and Chair of the University of Delaware’s Department of Individual and Family Studies, Marilou was an SRCD Fellow in the US Department of Education and served as Associate Executive Director for Professional Development at the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). Her publications draw connections between research evidence and early childhood programs, classroom practices, and workforce issues.

Marilou is a former editor-in-chief of Early Childhood Research Quarterly, former co-chair of SRCD’s Policy and Communications Committee, and a member of SRCD’s International Affairs Committee. She has served as a member of the Board of Examiners of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. She received a Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College in child development and early childhood education. 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.

Hirokazu Yoshikawa is the Courtney Sale Ross Professor of Globalization and Education at NYU Steinhardt and a university professor at NYU. He is a community and developmental psychologist who studies the effects of public policies and programs related to immigration, early childhood, and poverty reduction on children’s development. He has also conducted research on culture, sexuality and youth and young adult development in the contexts of HIV/AIDS risk and prevention and gay/straight alliances. He conducts research in the United States and in low- and middle-income countries.

He currently serves on the Leadership Council and as the Co-Chair of the early childhood development and education workgroup of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network, the research and technical group advising the Secretary-General on the post-2015 global development goals. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Education Sciences, the National Institutes of Health, and several foundations. His recent books include Making it Work: Low-Wage Employment, Family Life and Child Development (2006, Russell Sage, with Thomas Weisner and Edward Lowe), Toward Positive Youth Development: Transforming Schools and Community Programs (2008, Oxford University Press, with Marybeth Shinn), Immigrants Raising Citizens: Undocumented Parents and Their Young Children (2011, Russell Sage, sole authored), and Improving the Odds for America’s Children: Future Directions in Policy and Practice (2014, Harvard Education Press, with Kathleen McCartney and Laurie Forcier, a volume dedicated to the 40^th anniversary of the Children’s Defense Fund with a foreword by Congressman George Miller and an afterword by Marian Wright Edelman).

He has served on the Board on Children, Youth and Families of the National Academy of Sciences, the Early Childhood Advisory Committee of the Inter-American Development Bank, and the DHHS Advisory Committee on Head Start Research and Evaluation for the Clinton and Obama administrations. In 2012, he was nominated by President Obama and confirmed by the Senate as a member of the National Board for Education Sciences. In 2014, he was elected to the National Academy of Education. He currently serves on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Integration of Immigrants into American Society and its Forum on Investing in Young Children Globally. He obtained his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from NYU. Close.