The Brown University Department of Education is pleased to announce the promotions of two faculty members, Andrea Flores and Matthew Kraft, which became effective on July 1, 2025. Andrea Flores has been promoted to Associate Professor of Education, and Matthew Kraft has been promoted to Professor of Education and Economics.
Andrea Flores, Associate Professor of Education, is a cultural anthropologist who examines how educational experiences shape the identities, aspirations, and sense of belonging of immigrants and their descendants in the United States. She joined Brown in 2016 in the department and as a faculty associate at the Population Studies and Training Center (PSTC). She teaches undergraduate courses that use ethnographic perspectives to explore inequality, race, and youth identity.
Flores is the author of The Succeeders: How Immigrant Youth are Transforming What It Means to Belong in America (University of California Press, 2021), which won the 2022 Best Book Award from the Council on Anthropology and Education. Her second book project, Scientific Americans: Knowledge Migration in the Biological Century, investigates how foreign-born PhDs in the life sciences make migration and career decisions after completing training in the U.S.
She is also a co-investigator on two collaborative research projects. One, supported by the NSF, examines educational outcomes and caretaking practices among first-generation college students and their families during the Covid-19 pandemic using data from the Pandemic Journaling Project. The other, funded by the Peterson Foundation, focuses on the pandemic experiences of South Asian and Latinx immigrant women in New York City. Flores’s research has been supported by numerous national fellowships, including from the Spencer Foundation, Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, and Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund.
Matthew Kraft is a Professor of Education and Economics at Brown University, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow with IZA – Institute of Labor Economics, and an Invited Researcher at J-PAL North America. His research focuses on two primary areas: improving the effectiveness of K-12 educators and schools, and examining how education systems can adapt to and mitigate climate change. He has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles in leading education, economics, and public policy journals on topics such as teacher hiring, professional development, evaluation, and working conditions; new approaches to interpreting effect sizes in education research; and efforts to scale school-based tutoring and mentoring programs. In 2024-2025, he served on the White House Council of Economic Advisers as a Senior Economist for education policy.
Kraft recently founded and directs SustainableED - a new initiative at Brown University focused on advancing research at the intersection of education systems and climate change. He currently serves as an elected member of the Belmont (MA) school committee. Previously, he taught middle and high school humanities in Oakland and Berkeley (CA) public schools. He is the recipient of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Outstanding Public Communication Award, the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness Early Career Award, the William T. Grant Scholar Award, the Brown University Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Palmer O. Johnson Memorial Award for the most outstanding article across the seven flagship AERA journals, and the National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship.