525 West 125^th Street Box 039

New York, New York 10027

Phone: 212-678-3904

Fax: 212-678-3676

Jb224@columbia.edu

Education: B.A. Connecticut College, 1969 Major: Psychology

Dr. Jeanne Brooks-Gunn is the Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Child Development and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is the first director of the Center for Children and Families, which was founded in 1992, at Teachers College. In addition, she has directed the Adolescent Study Program at Teachers College and the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, and is Co-Director of the Institute for Child and Family Policy at Columbia University. She is a National Fellow, at Harvard University’s Inequality and Social Policy Program, a Visiting Scholar at the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, and a Senior Research Affiliate for the Joint Center for Poverty Research at Northwestern University/University of Chicago. Formerly, she was a Senior Research Scientist at Educational Testing Service and was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation.

She has served on three National Academy of Science Panels (Child Abuse and Neglect, Preventing HIV Infection, Defining Poverty). She is a member of the Social Science Research Council Committee on the urban underclass focusing on neighborhoods, families and children. She is past president of the Society for Research on Adolescence and is a fellow in the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society.

Author of over 325 published articles and 14 books, she has received the Vice President’s National Performance Review Hammer Award, for her participation in the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, National Institute for Child Health and Human Development Research Network (1998). She has been awarded the Nicholas Hobbs Award from the American Psychological Association’s Division of Children, Youth, and Families, for her contribution to policy research for children (1997), and has also received the John B. Hill Award from the Society for Research on Adolescence for her life-time contribution to research on adolescence, (1996). In 1988, she received the William Goode Book Award from the American Sociological Association for her book Adolescent mothers in later life.

Dr. Brooks-Gunn’s specialty is policy-oriented research focusing on family and community influences upon the development of children and youth. Her research centers around designing and evaluating interventions aimed at enhancing the well-being of children living in poverty and associated conditions. She is conducting the national evaluation of the Early Head Start program, and the middle childhood and adolescent follow-up of the Infant Health and Development Program. Both are early childhood and family support intervention programs. She is a Scientific Director of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. She has contributed to the design of several national longitudinal studies for children and families – the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (Child Supplement); the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (Child and Youth Supplement); and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. Currently, with her collaborators, she is conducting two long-term (30 year) longitudinal follow-up studies of children, youth and families in the Baltimore area.

Her books on these topics include Consequences of growing up poor, (1997); Escape from poverty: What makes a difference for children? (1995); Adolescent mothers in later life (1987), and Neighborhood poverty: Context and consequences for children, Volume 1. Policy implications in studying neighborhoods, Volume 2. (1997).

In addition, she also conducts research on transitional periods during childhood and adolescence, focusing on school, family and biological transitions in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. She is interested in the factors that contribute to positive and negative outcomes, and changes in well-being over these years.

Her books on transitions in childhood and adolescence include, He and she: How children develop their sex role identity (1979); Social cognition and the acquisition of self (1979); Girls at puberty: Biological and psychosocial perspectives (1983); The encyclopedia of adolescence (1990); Transitions through adolescence: Interpersonal domains and context (1996); and Conflict and cohesion in families: Causes and consequences (1999).