Jeanne Brooks-Gunn

Teachers College and College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University

Virginia & Leonard Marx Professor of Child Development & Education

Jeanne Brooks-Gunn is the Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Child Development at Teachers College and the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. A developmental psychologist, she obtained her B.A. from Connecticut College, Ed.M. from Harvard University and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Brooks-Gunn specializes in policy-oriented research that focuses on family and community influences on the development of children and youth. Her research centers on designing and evaluating interventions and policies aimed at enhancing the well-being of children, with a particular focus on children whose parents are poor, are single or have low levels of education. She also examines the interaction of development, biology and environment. She conducts multi-site longitudinal studies and coordinates experiments which explore the role of housing, as well as early childhood, afterschool, and home visiting programs in the development of children. Her books include Adolescent mothers in later life (1987), Consequences of growing up poor(1997) and Neighborhood Poverty: Context and consequences for children (Volume 1). Policy implications in studying neighborhoods (Volume 2) (1997). Professor Brooks-Gunn has received numerous honors and awards for her work. Her awards and recognitions include: election into the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies (2009); Honorary Doctorate of Science at Northwestern University (2009); the Society for Research in Child Development’s award for distinguished contributions to public policy for children (2005). She has been elected an American Educational Research Association Fellow (2010); Margaret Mead Fellow by the American Academy of Political and Social Science (2004) and has received the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award (2002) for outstanding contributions to the area of applied psychological research from the American Psychological Association. She was honored with the Distinguished Contributions to Research in Public Policy Award (2001) from the American Psychological Association and has also received the John B. Hill Awardfrom the Society for Research on Adolescence for her life-time contribution to research on adolescence (1996).