Robert C. Pianta, Ph.D., is Dean of the Curry School of Education, Director of the Center for Advanced Study in Teaching and Learning and Novartis U.S. Foundation Professor of Education at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. A former special education teacher, Dr. Pianta is a developmental, school, and clinical child psychologist whose work focuses on assessment and improvement of teacher-student interactions and their role in fostering children's learning and development.
Dr. Pianta is a principal investigator on several major grants including the National Center for Research in Early Childhood Education and the Virginia Education Sciences Training Program, and he has worked closely with the Gates Foundation-funded Measure of Effective Teaching project.
He is the author of more than 250 journal articles, chapters, and books in the areas of early childhood education, teacher performance assessment, professional development, and teacher–child relationships, and he consults regularly with federal agencies, foundations and universities.
Martha J. Cox, Ph.D., is Director of the Center for Developmental Science and Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Cox is known for her studies of families and young children and for her methodological contributions to the observational analysis of family interactions. Since the 1980s, she has studied the early years of family development and the processes of reorganization of families over the transition to parenthood and the transition to school with a special emphasis on the role of family relationships, including parent-child and marital relationships in children's successful adaptation to new challenges in the early years.
She is 1 of 10 principal investigators in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care, a study of children from birth through the elementary school years. She is Principal Investigator of the National Science Foundation-funded North Carolina Child Development Research Collaborative (CDRC). A centerpiece of the CDRC activities is a longitudinal, collaborative, multidisciplinary research study focusing on multiple levels of factors associated with successful development of a diverse group of young children. Dr. Cox is also the Co-principal Investigator of the program project Rural Children Living in Poverty, funded primarily by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development but also by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The purpose of this program project is to understand the early school readiness of an understudied but important group of children: impoverished children living in low-resource, rural areas of the country.
Donald B. Bailey, Jr., Ph.D., is Distinguished Fellow at RTI International. He is internationally known as an expert on young children with disabilities. For 27 years, he was on the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he was a W.R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor and, for 14 years, director of the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute. Dr. Bailey has addressed a variety of issues in his research and publications related to early intervention of children with disabilities and their families, with a particular focus on family support, inclusion, early identification, and fragile X syndrome. He has an extensive record of publications, with more than 200 peer-reviewed articles, chapters, and books on a wide variety of topics related to early education, early intervention, disability, and family support.
Barbara T. Bowman is a pioneer in the field of early childhood education. Throughout her career, she has been an advocate for young children, applying knowledge about child development to her work integrating policy and practice. She is a founder and past president of Erikson Institute and has held local and national leadership positions in public education and professional organizations. She is currently on the faculty of Erikson Institute.
Richard M. Clifford, Ph.D., has training in educational administration with specializations in political science and research. He has taught and has served as a principal in public schools. For more than 25 years, he has studied public policies and advised government officials and practitioners on policies affecting children and families. His work focuses on two major areas: public financing of programs for young children and the provision of appropriate learning environments for preschool and early school-age children. Dr. Clifford is co-author of a widely used series of instruments for evaluating learning environments for children, including the Family Day Care Rating Scale (FDCRS; Teachers College Press, 1989), co-authored with Thelma Harms, and the Infant/Toddler Environment Rating Scale (ITERS; Teachers College Press, 1990) and the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale0-Revised Edition (ECERS-R; Teachers College Press, 1998), both co-authored with Thelma Harms and Debby Cryer. In 1993-1994, Dr. Clifford helped establish and served as the first director of the Division of Child Development in the North Carolina Department of Human Resources and helped with the design and implementation of the state's Smart Start early childhood initiative. He is a past president of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC).
James J. Gallagher, Ph.D., is William R. Kenan Professor Emeritus, School of Education, FPG Child Development Institute, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Gallagher received his doctorate in child and clinical psychology at The Pennsylvania State University. His early work was at the Dayton Hospital for Disturbed Children and in the Psychology Clinic at Michigan State University. He spent 13 years at the Institute for Research on Exceptional Children at the University of Illinois conducting research on children with brain injury and mental retardation and on the education of highly gifted children. In 1967, Dr. Gallagher became the first director of the Bureau for the Education of the Handicapped (now the Office of Special Education Programs in the U.S. Department of Education), which was designed to carry out the new federal legislation on children with disabilities. He provided leadership for this program as the first major initiative for the federal government in special education. In 1970, he became a Kenan Professor and Director of the Frank Porter Graham Center (now the FPG Child Development Institute) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This multidisciplinary center conducted a wide variety of intervention research programs with young children. Dr. Gallagher also served from 1977 to 1986 as Director of the Bush Institute for Child and Family Policy, which introduced students to the analysis and development of policy for children. Dr. Gallagher has written or edited more than 15 books and monographs and more than 150 articles on a broad range of topics in the field of exceptional children. He co-wrote the basic textbook Educating Exceptional Children, now in its 11th edition (Kirk, Gallagher, Anastasiow, & Coleman, 2006, Houghton Mifflin). Dr. Gallagher has been president of the Council for Exceptional Children, Vice President for Education of the American Association on Mental Retardation, President of the National Association for Gifted Children, and President of the World Council for Gifted and Talented Children. In addition to receiving numerous awards, Dr. Gallagher was awarded the Gold Medal for Life Achievement in Psychology in the Public Interest from the American Psychological Association in 2005. Driving Change in Special Education reflects his continuing interest in public policy for children and families.
Craig Ramey, Ph.D., is the creator and founding director of the Abecedarian Project and its replicants including Project CARE and the Infant Health and Development Program. His program of research centers on the role of early experience, especially education – across the human lifespan - in the development of competence and robust health. His approach relies largely on experimental interventions in education, psychology, and pediatrics that provide rigorous tests of plausible developmental mechanisms of stability and change within dynamic, multilevel ecologies.
