Ron Haskins is a senior fellow in the Economic Studies program and co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution and senior consultant at the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore. From February to December of 2002 he was the senior advisor to the president for welfare policy at the White House.

Prior to joining Brookings and Casey, he spent 14 years on the staff of the House Ways and Means Human Resources Subcommittee, first as welfare counsel to the Republican staff, then as the subcommittee’s staff director. From 1981-1985, he was a senior researcher at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He also taught and lectured on history and education at UNC, Charlotte and developmental psychology at Duke University.

Haskins was the editor of the 1996, 1998, and 2000 editions of the Green Book, a 1600-page compendium of the nation’s social programs published by the House Ways and Means Committee that analyzes domestic policy issues including health care, poverty, and unemployment. Haskins is a senior editor of The Future of Children, a journal on policy issues that affect children and families. He has also co-edited several books, including Welfare Reform and Beyond: The Future of the Safety Net (2002), The New World of Welfare (2001) and Policies for America’s Public Schools: Teachers, Equity, and Indicators (Ablex, 1988), and is a contributor to numerous edited books and scholarly journals on children’s development and social policy issues. He is also the author of Work Over Welfare: The Inside Story of the 1996 Welfare Reform Law (2006) and the co-author of Creating an Opportunity Society (2009) with Isabel Sawhill and Getting Ahead or Losing Ground: Economic Mobility in America (Pew, 2008). He has appeared frequently on radio and television and has written articles and editorials for several newspapers and periodicals including the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Policy Review, State Government News, American Enterprise, National Review, and the Weekly Standard.
His areas of expertise include welfare reform, child care, child support, marriage, child protection, and budget and deficit issues. In 1997, Haskins was selected by the National Journal as one of the 100 most influential people in the federal government. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (2000); the President’s Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Field of Human Services from the American Public Human Services Association (2005); and the Lion Award from the Grantmakers for Children, Youth, and Families (2010).

He holds a Bachelor’s degree in History, a Master’s in Education, and a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology, from UNC, Chapel Hill. Haskins, who was a noncommissioned officer in the United States Marine Corps from 1963 to 1966, lives with his wife in Rockville, Maryland and is the father of four grown children.

Dr. James J. Kemple serves as the Executive Director of the Research Alliance for New York City Schools and Research Professor at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University.

Prior to joining the Research Alliance as its first Executive Director, Dr. Kemple spent more than 18 years at MDRC, a non-profit social policy research organization committed to improving the well being of low income populations across the United States. He served as the Director of MDRC’s K-12 Education Policy Area and specialized in the design and management of rigorous evaluations, including randomized controlled trials of educational and other social policy reforms. He served as Principal Investigator of MDRC’s studies of high school interventions including the Career Academies Evaluation, the Evaluation of the Talent Development Middle and High School Models, the Enhanced reading Opportunities Study, and the Study of the Content Literacy Continuum. Dr. Kemple also served as Co-Director of the National Reading First Impact Study, which MDRC is conducting with Abt Associates.

Prior to joining MDRC, Dr. Kemple taught high school math and managed the Higher Achievement Program, a three-phase academic and high school placement program for disadvantaged youth in Washington, DC. He coordinated a qualitative implementation study of the Boston Public School Curriculum objectives for the Citywide Education Coalition, and, with Richard Murnane and others, he coauthored Who Will Teach? Policies That Matter published by Harvard University Press.

Dr. Kemple holds a B.A. in Mathematics from the College of Holy Cross and an Ed.M. and Ed.D. from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education with a concentration in Administration, Planning, and Social Policy for Community and Urban Education.

Constance Nathanson is Professor of Clinical Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health and Co-Director of the Columbia University Population Center. Dr. Nathanson has published widely on the relation of gender to morbidity, mortality, and health services use and on reproductive health, focusing on adolescent fertility and the institutional provision of reproductive health services (hospital care, abortion services, and the like). Nathanson published the first paper (Social Science and Medicine, 1975) to call attention to the (apparent) paradox of women’s higher morbidity as compared to men’s higher mortality, with subsequent work building on, and substantially complicating, these findings. In a large NICHD/DBSB-funded study of contraceptive continuation among teenage women, she discovered that family planning clinic variables (clinic structure, attitudes and beliefs of clinic nurses) played a far larger role in continuation than did the young women’s attitudes and beliefs. These unanticipated results led, first, to Ford Foundation-supported qualitative research on young women’s experience with birth control pill use (published in Dangerous Passage: The Social Control of Sexuality in Women’s Adolescence); second, to a conceptual paper using bargaining theory to account for the timing of sexual debut (Nathanson and Schoen, 1993); third, to a paper with Young Kim disaggregating change over time in adolescent fertility (published in Demography in 1989); and, finally, to a (continuing) interest in the social, political, and historical circumstances surrounding the emergence and definition of public health problems, and in solutions proposed and implemented. Dangerous Passage heralded a shift in Nathanson’s scholarship toward more historically-informed, policy-oriented approaches to population health research.

Edwin Meléndez is a Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College and the Director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies. He has conducted considerable research in the areas of Latino studies, economic development, labor markets, and poverty. In addition to numerous scientific papers and other publications, he is the co-editor of the recently published Latinos in a Changing Society (Praeger, 2007), and the author or editor of ten books including Communities and Workforce Development (Upjohn Institute: 2004), Working on Jobs: The Center for Employment Training (Boston: Mauricio Gastón Institute,1996), and Hispanics in the Labor Force (Plenum Press,1991).

For over more than twenty years as principal investigator, he has managed over 40 research, outreach or demonstration projects and supervised or collaborated with over 60 researchers in projects that resulted in several edited books, special issues of academic journals, and other publications.

Originally from Puerto Rico, Dr. Meléndez came to the United States in 1978 after receiving a bachelor’s degree from the University of Puerto Rico. He earned a master’s degree in economics from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and in 1985 received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He began his teaching career at Fordham University in 1984, teaching economics and Puerto Rican studies.

Vivian Tseng is the vice president, program, at the William T. Grant Foundation. Dr. Tseng leads the Foundation’s grantmaking and spearheads its initiatives on increasing understanding of the use of research in policy and practice and improving research-practice connections. Since joining the Foundation in 2004, she has served in multiple capacities, most recently as senior program officer. Dr. Tseng has a deep interest in mentoring young researchers and is committed to strengthening the career pipeline for scholars of color. Thus, she also oversees the William T. Grant Scholars Program for promising early-career researchers and has significantly enhanced the program’s mentoring components. Previously, Dr. Tseng was an assistant professor in psychology and Asian American studies at California State University, Northridge. She received her doctorate in community psychology, with a minor in quantitative methods and a concentration in developmental psychology, from New York University and her bachelor of arts in psychology, with a specialization in Asian American studies, from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research has focused on understanding how immigration, race, and culture affect youth and their families. Dr. Tseng has been published in Child Development, Journal of Marriage and the Family, American Journal of Community Psychology, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and the Handbooks of Parenting, Asian American Psychology, and 21st Century Education, among others. Her recent publications focus on evidence-based policy and practice and mentoring for young scholars.