Mahasan Chaney is an Assistant Professor of Education. She received her Ph.D. in Education from UC Berkeley in 2019 and was later a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA) and the Watson Institute at Brown University. Her research and teaching focus on education policy, and the history of education and center on three related policy areas: the racial politics of education, the politics of school punishment, and the ideologies and discourses of federal education reform.

Jonathan E. Collins is an Assistant Professor of Education. His research focuses on urban school reform, local politics, race and ethnicity, civic engagment and deliberative democracy. His research has been published in Political Behavior, the Urban Affairs Review, the Journal of Urban Affairs, and Local Government Studies.  

Pierre de Galbert is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Brown University in the education department. His research focuses on language of instruction policies in low- and middle-income countries, and the association between language policies and learning in the early years of formal school. He is particularly interested in the multi-dimensional set of factors that influence both the language policy decisions and their implementation. He is also interested in educational measurement, specifically focusing on literacy acquisition in non-dominant languages.

Andrea Flores is a cultural anthropologist who specializes in the anthropology of education. Her research interests primarily center on Latino/a youth’s higher educational aspirations and experiences of social belonging. 

Indira Gil holds a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction in Mathematics from Florida International University. Dr. Gil has extensive experience teaching mathematics at the middle school, high school, and college level. Her research interests include making mathematics accessible to all students, aiding students in developing their math identities, culturally responsive teaching, supporting teacher agency and advocating for educators.

Tricia Kelly has extensive experience working with Multilingual Learners as a teacher, program consultant, and curriculum specialist. She has taught in Spanish/English bilingual programs in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island and has served as an MLL Specialist supporting teachers in Providence-based charter schools. She earned her doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University where her research focused on cross-cultural relationships within dual-language programs. Current research interests include ways to infuse asset-based and culturally-affirming practices into integrated programs for Multilingual Learners in K-12 school settings. 

Matthew Kraft is an Associate Professor of Education and Economics at Brown University. His research and teaching interests include the economics of education, education policy analysis, and applied quantitative methods for causal inference. He studies human capital policies in education with a focus on teacher effectiveness and organizational change in K-12 urban public schools.   

Prof. Hilary Levey Friedman is a sociologist and expert on beauty pageants, childhood and parenting, competitive afterschool activities, and popular culture who teaches courses in the Department of Education at Brown University (where she is also an Affiliate of the Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy). She holds degrees from Harvard University, Princeton University, and the University of Cambridge.

Dr. Jin Li is Professor of Education and Human Development at Brown University. Originally from China, she received her B.A. in German from Guangzhou Institute of Foreign Languages in 1982. She earned her first Ed.M. in education from the University of Pittsburgh in 1988, her second Ed.M. in Administrative Planning and Social Policy in 1991, and her doctoral degree in human development and psychology from Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1997.

Lindsay C. Page is the Annenberg Associate Professor of Education Policy at Brown University and is a faculty research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her work focuses on quantitative methods and their application to questions regarding the effectiveness of educational policies and programs across the pre-school to postsecondary spectrum. Much of her work has involved large-scale experimental or quasi-experimental studies to investigate the causal effects of strategies for improving students’ transition to and through college. She is particularly interested in policy efforts to improve college access and success for students who would be first in their families to reach postsecondary education. She holds a doctorate in quantitative policy analysis and master's degrees in statistics and in education policy from Harvard University. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College.

John Palella joins us from Clark University where he was the inaugural postdoctoral teaching fellow in the Center for Gender, Race, and Area Studies. Dr. Palella has been working in history and social studies education since 2002 as a social studies teacher, researcher, teacher educator, and professor. After finishing his M.A. in social studies education at New York University, Dr. Palella then went on to complete a Ph.D. in gender history from the University at Albany, S.U.N.Y. His research and teaching interests are in histories of race, gender, and sexuality; promoting antiracism through storytelling, role playing, and process drama; and teaching LGBTQIA+ history in social studies classrooms. 

John Papay is an Associate Professor of Education and Economics at Brown University. His research focuses on teacher policy, the economics of education, and teacher labor markets. He has published on teacher value-added models, teacher evaluation, high-stakes testing, teacher compensation, and program evaluation methodology. He has served as a Research Affiliate with the Project on the Next Generation of Teachers and a Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard.

Emily Kalejs Qazilbash is a Professor of Practice in Education at Brown University. Dr. Qazilbash most recently served as Chief Human Capital Officer in the Boston Public Schools. After beginning her career as a teacher in Baltimore and Boston, she conducted research focused on issues of teacher quality and worked on issues such as educator evaluation, teachers unions, school reform efforts, and Peer Assistance and Review (PAR) programs. She holds degrees from the University of Virginia and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. 

David Rangel is a sociologist of education. He studies the relationship between education and social inequality, with emphasis on the Latinx experience in the United States. In particular, his research examines family-school relations, focusing on how social class, race, ethnicity, and the broader social context structure relations within families, between families, and between families and schools.

Diane Silva Pimentel's career has focused on secondary science education, but she works towards creating educational settings that support the growth and success of all students. She began this work as a classroom teacher and continues this work now working with pre-service and in-service teachers. As the Director of the Brown Master of Arts in Teaching program, Silva Pimentel's goal has been to develop a program that prepares our graduate students to meet the multifaceted responsibilities of the teaching profession in a way that positively impacts their students and communities. Specifically in science education, her main interests focus on supporting the participation and persistence of underrepresented students in STEM. She accomplishes this by serving as a faculty member in teacher preparation, creating professional development opportunities for science teachers that support the implementation of reform-based and culturally responsive teaching approaches, and with her scholarly contributions to the field.  

Laura has come to Brown from the University of California, Berkeley where she is completing doctoral work and where she worked in a multicultural urban teacher education program. Laura brings a wealth of both K-12 teaching and administrative experience, along with research interests that range from issues around project-based learning to the use of drama in teaching literacy to preservice teacher performance assessment.

Tracy Steffes is Associate Professor of Education and History. Her primary research and teaching interests are twentieth century United States history, the history of American education, and political and policy history. 

Crystal Thomas holds a Ph.D. in Social Welfare from UCLA and currently serves as a Lecturer in the Department of Education at Brown University. Dr. Thomas has extensive experience working within academic interdisciplinary research teams and among public/private partnerships both in Los Angeles and New York City, among other regions. Her research utilizes both qualitative and quantitative methods to advance policy and programming, including the use geographic information systems and spatial analysis to illuminate regional trends.

Kenneth Wong is the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Chair for Education Policy and director of the Urban Education Policy A.M. program at Brown University. He is also a Professor of Political Science and Professor of International and Public Affairs. He has conducted extensive research in the politics of education, federalism, policy innovation, outcome-based accountability, and governance redesign (including city and state takeover, management reform, and Title I school-wide reform).

Yoko Yamamoto has examined education, families, and children in diverse sociocultural contexts over the last 20 years. Integrating theories and research in psychology, sociology, and education, she has focused on understanding parental beliefs and engagement in their children’s education and documenting how educational advantages or disadvantages emerge in association with socioeconomic status, gender, ethnicity/culture, and minority/immigrant status. She currently conducts longitudinal research examining both strengths and challenges in diverse families' socialization and their children's development of learning-related beliefs and attitudes in Japan and the U.S.