Board Member

Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Ph.D. is the Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Child Development at Columbia University’s Teachers College and the College of Physicians and Surgeons. She directs the National Center for Children and Families (which focuses on policy research on children and families) at the University. A life span developmental psychologist, she is interested in how lives unfold over time and factors that contribute to wellbeing across childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. She conducts long-run studies beginning when mothers are pregnant or have just given birth of a child (sometimes following these families for thirty years). Other studies follow families in different types of neighborhoods and housing. In addition, she designs and evaluates intervention programs for children and parents (home visiting programs for pregnant women or new parents, early childhood education programs for toddlers and preschoolers, two generation programs for young children and their parents, and after school programs for older children). She is the author of several books including Adolescent mothers in later life; Consequences of Growing up Poor; Neighborhood Poverty: Context and consequences for children. She has been elected into both the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Education, and she has received lifetime achievement awards from the Society for Research in Child Development, American Academy of Political and Social Science, the American Psychological Society, American Psychological Association, and Society for Research on Adolescence. She holds an honorary doctorate from Northwestern University and the distinguished alumni award from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education.