Jeanne Brooks-Gunn is the Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Child Development and Education at Columbia University’s Teachers College. She is a Professor of Pediatrics at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and is a Co-director of the National Center for Children and Families at Columbia’s Teachers College.Brooks-Gunn directs the National Center for Children and Families, which focuses on policy research on children and families at Columbia University. A life span developmental psychologist, she is interested in how lives unfold over time and factors that contribute to well-being across childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. She conducts long run studies beginning when mothers are pregnant or have just given birth of a child, sometimes following these families for 30 years. Other studies follow families in different types of neighborhoods and housing. In addition, she designs and evaluates intervention programs for children and parents (home visiting programs for pregnant women or new parents, early childhood education programs for toddlers and preschoolers, two generation programs for young children and their parents, and after school programs for older children). She is the author of several books including Adolescent Mothers in Later Life; Consequences of Growing up Poor; and Neighborhood Poverty: Context and Consequences for Children. She has been elected into both the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Education, and she has received lifetime achievement awards from the Society for Research in Child Development, American Academy of Political and Social Science, the American Psychological Society, American Psychological Association and Society for Research on Adolescence. She holds an honorary doctorate from Northwestern University and the distinguished alumni award from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education.

Biography current as of January 29, 2019