Felice Levine

American Educational Research Association

Executive Director

Felice J. Levine is Executive Director of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). Previously she was Executive Officer of the American Sociological Association (ASA). She was also Director of the Law and Social Science Program at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Senior Research Social Scientist at the American Bar Foundation. She holds A.B., A.M., and Ph.D. degrees in sociology and psychology from the University of Chicago. Levine’s work focuses on research and science policy issues, research ethics and conduct, data access and sharing, open knowledge, the scientific and academic workforce, and diversity and inclusion in higher education. She served on the National Human Research Protections Advisory Committee of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and on the 2000 Decennial Census Advisory Committee. She also served on the National Academies panels that produced reports on Putting People on the Map: Protecting Confidentiality with Linked Social-Spatial Data and Proposed Revisions to the Common Rule for the Protection of Human Subjects in Research in the Behavioral and Social Sciences and chaired the Academies workshop on Protecting Student's Records and Facilitating Education Research. Of her many capacity building roles, she is most proud of the Minority Opportunities through School Transformation (MOST) Program—an ASA sustained initiative fostering department-level systemic change in 11 academic institutions that expanded opportunities and transformed the climate and culture for students. Trained as a social psychologist, Levine has been deeply engaged in advancing the social, behavioral, and education sciences throughout her career. She is principal investigator of the longstanding AERA-NSF Grants Program and a member of its Governing Board. She is collaborating with Margaret Levenstein at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research on the development of an NSF-funded research data hub to connect data resources, foster new scholarly networks, and build research capacity in STEM education, and with Suzanne Ortega at the Council of Graduate Schools on an NSF initiative examining the impact of and fostering academic support for open science products. Most timely, Levine is engaged in a multi-method study of the impact of COVID-19 on doctoral students and early-career education researchers in collaboration with Na’ilah Suad Nasir at the Spencer Foundation. Levine’s collaborative orientation extends to other organizations. She is Chair of the Board of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics, Co-Chair of the Societies Consortium on Sexual Harassment in STEMM, and a member-at-large of the Social, Political, and Economic Sciences Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Levine also serves on the Board of the Consortium of Social Science Associations and the Board of Databrary as well as on the Advisory Group of the Center for Engineering, Ethics, and Society and the Advisory Group of the Humanities Indicators Project. She is on the Judging Panel of the Yidan Prize Foundation, Hong Kong, and is also convenor of the Americas Education Research Network aimed at fostering research communication, collaboration, and capacity in the Americas across the global north and south. Levine is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Educational Research Association, and the Association for Psychological Science and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. She is also a Past President of the Law and Society Association (LSA) and Past President and Past Secretary General of the World Education Research Association (WERA). She is currently co-editor of the WERA book series, Global Perspectives on Education Research. In 2019, she received the LSA Legacy Award and, in 2020, she received the Stuart A. Rice Award for Career Achievement and Significant Contributions to the Discipline conferred by the District of Columbia Sociological Society.