Researchers

The following individuals contributed to the research featured in the Book: Changing Places: How Communities Will Improve the Health of Boys of Color.

Dolores Acevedo-Garcia has a doctoral degree in public policy and demography. She joined the Harvard School of Public Health faculty in 1998. Her research interests include the effect of social determinants on health disparities, especially along racial and ethnic lines, and the role of nonhealth policies in reducing those disparities. In 2009, Acevedo-Garcia began a new position as a tenured associate professor at Northeastern University in the Department of Health Sciences, Bouvé College of Health Sciences. She also serves as associate director of the Institute on Urban Health Research at Northeastern, where she leads a research program on social determinants of health and racial/ethnic health disparities. She keeps an adjunct faculty position at the Harvard School of Public Health, where she participates in the Maternal and Child Health Studies Concentration.

Estela Mara Bensimon is a professor of higher education and codirector of the Center for Urban Education at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education. Her current research centers on issues of racial equity in higher education from the perspective of organizational learning and sociocultural practice theories. She is particularly interested in place-based, practitioner-driven inquiry as a means of organizational change in higher education. Bensimon has held leadership positions in the Association for the Study of Higher Education (president, 2005–06) and in the American Education Research Association’s Division on Postsecondary Education (vice president, 1992–94). She has served on the boards of the American Association for Higher Education and the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Bensimon was associate dean of the Rossier School of Education from 1996 to 2000 and a Fulbright Scholar to Mexico in 2002. She earned her doctorate in higher education from Teachers College at Columbia University.

Ariel H. Bierbaum is the program director at the Center for Cities & Schools (CC&S) at the University of California at Berkeley. She works on research efforts with regional partners, local city agencies and districts, and the California Department of Education on issues of school siting, cross-jurisdictional collaboration, and other educational impacts of regional and local planning policies. She also oversees the Engaging Students and Schools Initiative, which examines expanding stakeholder participation in public-planning practice to include youth, families, and schools. Bierbaum brings ten years of academic and professional experience in city and regional planning, city government, strategic planning and communications, community engagement, and university-community relations. She holds a master’s degree in city planning from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor’s degree in urban studies from the University of Pennsylvania.

Robin Bishop works with Estela Bensimon as a research assistant at the Center for Urban Education. She is enrolled in the University of Southern California’s doctoral program in urban education policy. She earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology from California State University at Northridge and her master’s degree in student-affairs counseling from the University of California at Los Angeles. Bishop spent three years as the assistant director of academic advisement at Mount St. Mary’s College in downtown Los Angeles. She later transitioned to teaching, serving as an instructor of psychology and developmental mathematics. Bishop’s research interests include culturally responsive pedagogy, effective teaching strategies for the success of underprepared students, and achieving racial equity in student outcomes.

Angela Glover Blackwell is the founder and chief executive officer of PolicyLink, which was established in 1999 to advance economic and social equity. Under her leadership PolicyLink has become a leading voice in the movement to use public policy to improve access and opportunity for low-income people and communities of color. A renowned community-building activist and advocate, Blackwell served as senior vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation, where she oversaw the foundation’s Domestic and Cultural divisions. A lawyer by training, Blackwell gained national recognition as founder of the Oakland (California) Urban Strategies Council, where she pioneered new approaches to neighborhood revitalization. From 1977 to 1987 she was a partner at Public Advocates, a nationally known public-interest law firm. She is the coauthor of Uncommon Common Ground: Race and America’s Future and a contributor to Ending Poverty in America: How to Restore the American Dream. Blackwell earned a bachelor’s degree from Howard University and a law degree from the School of Law, University of California, Berkeley. She serves on numerous boards and served as cochair of a task force on poverty for the Center for American Progress.

Sandra L. Bloom is a board-certified psychiatrist, a graduate of Temple University School of Medicine, and was recently awarded the Temple University School of Medicine Alumni Achievement Award. In addition to her faculty position at the School of Public Health at Drexel University, she is president of CommunityWorks, an organizational consulting firm committed to the development of nonviolent environments. Bloom currently serves as Distinguished Fellow of the Andrus Children’s Center in Yonkers, New York. From 1980 to 2001 she was the founder and executive director of the Sanctuary programs, inpatient psychiatric programs for the treatment of trauma-related emotional disorders. In partnership with Andrus Children’s Center, Bloom has established a training institute, the Sanctuary Leadership Development Institute, to train a wide variety of programs in the Sanctuary Model. This model is now applied in residential treatment programs for children, domestic violence shelters, group homes, and homeless shelters, and is used in other settings as a method of organizational development. She is a past president of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. She is author of Creating Sanctuary: Toward the Evolution of Sane Societies and coauthor of Bearing Witness: Violence and Collective Responsibility.

Susan J. Colby is a founding partner of the Bridgespan Group’s San Francisco office, where she leads the organization’s work in K–12 education and foundation strategy. She focuses on client and knowledge-related activities with a particular emphasis on disadvantaged populations; she has engaged with foundations on major strategy and organization issues and has also consulted to a variety of nonprofit organizations—from smaller, local community-based organizations to larger national agencies. Before joining Bridgespan, Colby served as copresident of the Sustainable Development Sector at Pharmacia (previously Monsanto). She also worked for ten years at McKinsey & Company, where she cofounded and co-led the North American Environment Practice. Colby began her consulting career at Bain & Company, after receiving her bachelor’s degree from American University (cum laude) and her master’s degree in business administration from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.

Gilberto Q. Conchas obtained a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He is an associate professor of education and Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California at Irvine. Before UCI, Conchas was an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He most recently served as senior program officer with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, managing the research portfolio on U.S. inequity. The focus of his research is urban school success, social inequality and education, and educational policy and reform. Conchas is the author of The Color of Success and the coauthor of Small Schools and Urban Youth. He is currently working on his third book (coauthored with James Diego Vigil), StreetSmart SchoolSmart: Urban Poverty and the Education of Adolescent Boys. Conchas has been a visiting scholar at the University of Barcelona, the University of Southern California, San Francisco State University, and the University of Washington.

Theodore Corbin is an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the Drexel University College of Medicine. He is also the founder and director of Healing Hurt People, a trauma-informed intervention for victims of interpersonal violence. He received his bachelor’s degree from Lincoln University in Lincoln, Pennsylvania, and spent two years teaching biology to students at a public high school in the South Bronx, New York. Corbin earned his medical degree at The Medical College of Pennsylvania/The Hahnemann School of Medicine in Philadelphia and completed his residency in emergency medicine at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He received his master’s of public policy degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs at Princeton University. He is board-certified in emergency medicine. Prior to coming to Drexel, Corbin was on the faculty of the Jefferson Medical College, where he also served as assistant director of the emergency medicine residency program. He is also a Soros Physician Advocacy Fellow. His current interests center around youth violence prevention in Philadelphia, trauma-informed practice in public health, health disparities, and access to health care for vulnerable populations.

Amy Ellen Duke-Benfield is a senior policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP). Her focus is on access to and success in adult education, English as a second language, and postsecondary education and training for low-skilled adults and youth. Duke-Benfield analyzes and advocates for federal and state workforce and education policies that better serve low-income adults and provides technical assistance to state and local advocates and governments in these areas. She spearheads CLASP’s work around Title II of the Workforce Investment Act (the Adult Education and Family Literacy Act), the Higher Education Act, and related federal postsecondary legislation. Previously, she was a research associate at the Urban Institute, where she contributed to several evaluations of state-level welfare reform and antipoverty programs. Duke-Benfield holds a bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College as well as a master’s degree from Emory University.

Susan Eaton is research director at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School. Her scholarly and research interests center around the causes and cures for unequal opportunities for racial, ethnic, and linguistic minorities in the United States. Eaton is particularly concerned about the challenges of schooling and childrearing in high-poverty, urban neighborhoods. She is the author of The Children in Room E4: American Education on Trial; The Other Boston Busing Story: What’s Won and Lost Across the Boundary Line; and (with Gary Orfield) Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education. She holds a doctorate in education from Harvard University, where she was assistant director at the Project on School Desegregation. For a decade Eaton was a staff reporter at daily newspapers in Massachusetts and Connecticut, where she won several awards for her writing about public education. Her writing appears regularly in a variety of scholarly and popular publications.

Christopher Edley Jr. joined the School of Law, University of California, Berkeley, as dean and professor of law in 2004, after twenty-three years as a professor at Harvard Law School. He earned a law degree and a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard, where he served as an editor and officer of the Harvard Law Review. Edley’s academic work is primarily in the areas of civil rights and administrative law. He was cofounder of the Harvard Civil Rights Project. His publications include Not All Black and White: Affirmative Action, Race, and American Values and Administrative Law: Rethinking Judicial Control of Bureaucracy. Previous positions have included associate director at the White House Office of Management and Budget; special counsel to the president, directing the White House review of affirmative action; consultant to President Clinton’s advisory board on the Race Initiative; and congressional appointee on the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He was a member of the Carter-Ford National Commission on Federal Election Reform. He is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Public Administration, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Law Institute. At the University of California at Berkeley, he is founder and faculty director of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity, and Diversity. He serves as senior policy adviser to Mark Yudof, the president of the University of California system.

Edward Fergus is deputy director of the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education at New York University. A former high school teacher, he continues to provide technical assistance and analysis on education policy and research to school districts. Fergus has published various articles on disproportionality in special education as well as race and ethnicity in schools, and he is the author of Skin Color and Identity Formation: Perceptions of Opportunity and Academic Orientation among Mexican and Puerto Rican Youth. He is on the board of various organizations, including the Campaign for Fiscal Equity and Yonkers Partners in Education. He was previously an education and research analyst at the National Technical Assistance Center for Community Schools at the Children’s Aid Society and a program evaluator with Metis Associates. Fergus is currently the coprincipal investigator of a study of single-sex schools for boys of color (funded by the Gates Foundation), the New York State Technical Assistance Center on Disproportionality, and various other research and programmatic endeavors focused on disproportionality and educational opportunity. He received his doctorate and master’s degree in social foundations and educational policy from the University of Michigan. Fergus earned his bachelor’s degree in political science and a teaching certificate from Beloit College.

Shawn Ginwright is an associate professor of education in the Africana Studies Department and a senior research associate for the Cesar Chavez Institute for Public Policy at San Francisco State University. In 1989 he founded Leadership Excellence, Inc., an innovative youth development agency located in Oakland, California, that trains African American youths to address pressing social and community problems. In 1999 he received his doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley. Ginwright’s research examines the ways in which youths in urban communities navigate through the constraints of poverty and struggle to create equality and justice in their schools and communities. He is the author of Black Youth Rising: Activism and Radical Healing in Urban America; Black in School: Afrocentric Reform, Black Youth, and the Promise of Hip-Hop Culture; and coeditor of Beyond Resistance! Youth Resistance and Community Change: New Democratic Possibilities for Practice and Policy for America’s Youth. Ginwright has published extensively on issues related to urban youths in such journals as Social Problems, Social Justice, Urban Review, and New Directions in Youth Development. He is a highly sought speaker for national and international audiences.

Jarvis Ray Givens was born and raised by his mother and grandmother in Compton, California. Upon completing high school, he attended the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned his bachelor’s of science in business administration from the Walter A. Haas School of Business, with a minor in African American Studies. During his undergraduate years he was deeply involved in community organizing though his fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha and many other community-based organizations. As a student at Berkeley, he was selected as a Mellon Mays Fellow. In 2010 he began a doctoral program at the University of California at Berkeley in the Department of African American Studies. Currently Givens’s research interests revolve around the sociohistorical analysis of the Million Man March of 1995 and community organizing in African American urban communities after the modern civil rights movement.

Frank Harris III is assistant professor of postsecondary educational leadership and student affairs at San Diego State University. His research is broadly focused on student development in higher education and explores questions related to the social construction of gender and race on college campuses, college men and masculinities, and racial and ethnic disparities in college student outcomes. His scholarship has been published in the Journal of College Student Development, Journal of Men’s Studies, Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice, and a range of other journals and edited books. He is coeditor (with Shaun R. Harper) of College Men and Masculinities: Theory, Research, and Implications for Practice. Before joining the faculty at San Diego State, Harris spent nearly ten years as a student affairs educator and college administrator. His most recent administrative appointment was associate director of the Center for Urban Education at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education. Harris earned a bachelor’s degree in communication studies from Loyola Marymount University, a master’s degree in speech communication from California State University at Northridge, and a doctorate in higher education from the University of Southern California.

Linda Harris is the director of Youth Policy at the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP). She has more than twenty-five years of experience in youth and workforce development policy, research, and administration at the local, state, and national levels. Her expertise centers on disconnected and disadvantaged youth in high-poverty communities. She cochairs the Campaign for Youth, an alliance of national organizations that seeks to raise awareness about the 32 percent of youth who drop out of school and fall outside of the labor-market mainstream. Harris also played a lead role in establishing the Communities Collaborating to Reconnect Youth (CCRY) network, a vehicle for peer-to-peer exchange among communities that are engaged in cross-system programming for high-risk youth. Her publications include Creating Postsecondary Pathways to Good Jobs for Young High School Dropouts; Learning from the Youth Opportunity Experience: Building Delivery Capacity in Distressed Communities; What’s a Youngster to Do: The Education and Labor Market Plight of Youth in High Poverty Communities; and Making the Workforce–Justice Connection for Re-entering Youth Offenders. Before joining CLASP, Harris served as director of the Baltimore City Mayor’s Office of Employment Development and as administrator for the Baltimore City Private Industry Council. She has provided consulting and technical support to several communities across the country on design and implementation of workforce programs for youth and adults. She has served on numerous state and national boards. Harris holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Morgan State University and a master’s degree in urban and public affairs from Carnegie Mellon University.

Loren Harris is the founder of Thinking Man Consulting, a social enterprise that works with individual philanthropists and family foundations to maximize the social return on their philanthropic investments and supports efforts to strengthen families and communities through initiatives that explicitly engage men and boys. He recently completed his tenure with the Ford Foundation as the Program Officer responsible the Ford Foundation’s Youth funding in the United States. A primary interest of his grantmaking at Ford was advancing strategies to reduce racially disparate youth outcomes. Prior to joining Ford, Harris served for five years as Associate Program Officer for the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, during which he designed and implemented the Fathers at Work Initiative. Fathers at Work and other Mott supported efforts were funded with the aim of reducing poverty through support for interventions that help people facing multiple barriers obtain well-paying, unsubsidized employment. Prior to this role, he managed a STRIVE replication site in New York City that specialized in connecting young people to employment. Harris holds a bachelor’s in U.S. History from Queens College in New York and a master’s degree in public administration from Fairleigh Dickinson University.

Waldo E. Johnson Jr. is an associate professor at the School of Social Service Administration (SSA) and immediate past director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture (CSRPC). At SSA he teaches social welfare policy and human behavior in the social environment in the master’s program and research methods in the master’s and doctoral programs. He holds master’s and Ph.D. degrees in social work from the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago, respectively. A family research scholar, Johnson’s substantive research focuses on male roles and involvement in African American families, nonresident fathers in fragile families, and the physical and psychosocial health statuses of African American males. As a research methodologist, he is interested in the use of qualitative research methods in guiding policy and practice research. He chairs the Commission on Research for the Council on Social Work Education and is a member of the Steering Committee for the 2025 Campaign for Black Men and Boys and the Ford Foundation Scholars Network on Masculinity and the Wellbeing of African American Males. His is the author of Social Work with African American Males: Health, Mental Health and Social Policy.

David L. Kirp is a professor of public policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. His work ranges across the social policy landscape and he has been directly involved in policy making, most recently as a member of the Presidential Transition Team in 2008. Kirp’s current research focuses on “kids-first” policy. His fifteen books include The Sandbox Investment: The Preschool Movement and Kids-First Politics and Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: Higher Education Goes to Market. His latest book is Healthy, Wealthy and Wise: Five Big Ideas to Transform Children’s Lives. A former Sacramento Bee associate editor, Kirp has written articles appearing in a wide variety of journals, magazines, and newspapers, including the New York Times, The Nation, and American Prospect. He serves on the board of Experience Corps, Friends of the Children, and the Coro Center for Civic Leadership, and he consults with public agencies, foundations, and nonprofits. Kirp is a recipient of Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award.

Sarah Lawrence is director of programs at the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice at the School of Law, University of California, Berkeley. Her areas of interest are prisoner reentry, adult corrections, juvenile justice, and youth and gang violence. Her work focuses on improving the justice system and increasing public safety by linking criminal justice research and analysis with policymakers and building partnerships across diverse stakeholder groups. Lawrence previously served as director of research for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety, where she established a research and policy analysis department that provided state-level strategic and analytical support on public safety, criminal justice issues, and homeland security issues. In 2004 she served as senior policy analyst for the Governor’s Commission on Corrections Reform for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Lawrence was a research associate in the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute, where she authored several publications on prisoner reentry and parole reform. She has a master’s degree in public policy from the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Cornell University.

María C. Ledesma is an assistant professor in educational leadership and policy at the University of Utah’s College of Education. She received a bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley and a master’s degree in administration, planning, and social policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. While she was a doctoral student at the University of California at Los Angeles, Ledesma was student regent for the University of California’s Board of Regents, the first Latina to hold this post. She coordinated a systemwide study of the role and state of diversity within the University of California ten years after the passage of Proposition 209, which eliminated the use of race and ethnicity in public employment, contracting, and education within the state of California. The study produced a series of reports and recommendations focusing on campus climate as well as diversity among undergraduates, graduate students, professional school students, and faculty. Ledesma earned a doctorate in education from the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles. She is a two-time award recipient from the Ford Foundation, having earned a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her research interests include critical policy analysis, including critical analysis of race-conscious affirmative action policy in public selective institutions.

Marcus Littles is the Founder and Director of Organizational Development of Frontline Solutions. He specializes in organizational development, particularly within the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. His work experience includes TCC Group, the Ford Foundation, where he served as a Program Associate in Community and Resource Development, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Littles is the founder of Frontline Solutions, and provides leadership to projects in organizational development, policy advocacy and philanthropic engagement. A native of Mobile, he is a graduate of Auburn University and holds a Master’s Degree in Public Administration, with a concentration in Nonprofit Management, from the University of Delaware.

Jennifer Lynn-Whaley is a senior research associate at the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice (BCCJ) at the School of Law, University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include alternatives to incarceration, juvenile justice policy, and the use of childhood neurodevelopmental science to inform prevention strategies for at-risk youth. Before joining BCCJ, she was the Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative (JDAI) coordinator for the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council in Washington, D.C., where she worked with stakeholders to reform juvenile detention practices. Previously, Lynn-Whaley was a program analyst for the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency for Community Justice Programs in Washington, D.C. She designed and implemented the agency’s intervention for violent offenders. She also worked for the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice in Washington, D.C., as the program manager for Violence Against Women Grants and Crime Victims Assistance Grants. She served as a research assistant in the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute and at the Violence Policy Center. Lynn-Whaley obtained her doctorate in criminal justice from American University. She graduated with her bachelor’s degree in literature from the University of California at Santa Barbara’s College of Creative Studies.

Tia Elena Martinez is a strategic adviser to the U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights. Previously, she was a manager in Bridgespan’s San Francisco office, where she led engagements in the areas of education, poverty, and civil rights and served as the firm’s content expert on K–12 education. Before joining Bridgespan, Martinez served as a senior fellow at the Hewlett Foundation, where she coauthored a seminal paper on disconnected youth and worked on issues related to the children of immigrants in California. Before Hewlett, Martinez worked for the Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH) as a housing policy analyst, where she completed a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of the provision of supportive housing to mentally ill, substance-abusing homeless adults in San Francisco. She has a bachelor’s degree in history from Harvard University, a master’s degree in public policy from the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, and a law degree from Stanford Law School.

Nancy McArdle is a researcher and author with more than twenty years’ experience analyzing housing policy and demographics, migration and settlement patterns, racial segregation, and the intersection between civil rights and opportunity. She received a master’s of public policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and was research analyst at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies and research director of the Harvard Civil Rights Project’s Metro Boston Equity Initiative. McArdle has served as an expert witness, providing analysis and testimony at trial in several major legal cases involving housing and school segregation. She is currently adjunct associate professor at the Institute for Urban Health Research at Northeastern University and Senior Research Analyst with DiversityData.org, a Web site allowing comparison of a wide range of socioeconomic, demographic, and neighborhood indicators by race and ethnicity for all U.S. metropolitan areas. McArdle is a recent contributor to the books Twenty-first Century Color Lines: Multiracial Change in Contemporary Society and The Integration Debate: Competing Futures for American Cities.

Deborah L. McKoy is the executive director and founder of the Center for Cities and Schools in the Institute of Urban and Regional Development at the University of California at Berkeley. She is also a lecturer in Berkeley’s Department of City and Regional Planning and Graduate School of Education. Her research and teaching focuses on the intersection of educational reform, urban and metropolitan planning, community development and public policy. Central to her work is understanding the critical role young people play in urban and metropolitan change and transformation. For nearly two decades she has been bridging the worlds of research, policy, and practice through a wide range of professional experiences including: consultant to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD); chief of economic development at the New York City Housing Authority; director of refugee services for CAMBA, a New York nonprofit organization; and consultant to the United Nation’s Education For All initiative. McKoy has a master’s degree in public policy and administration from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in educational policy, with a specialization in urban planning from UC Berkeley.

Milbrey McLaughlin is the David Jacks Professor of Education and Public Policy at the School of Education at Stanford University. Her research combines studies of K–12 education policy in the United States and work on the broad question of community-school collaboration to support youth development. Her research on public education focuses on how school teaching is shaped by such “context” issues as organizational policy and the social-cultural conditions of the schools, districts, and communities. McLaughlin is involved with local efforts to engage whole communities schools, community organizations and agencies, parents, and faith-based institutions in developing new strategies and capacity to promote youth development. She is codirector of the Center for Research on the Context of Teaching, an education research center that analyzes how teaching and learning are shaped by their contexts and the connection between teacher learning communities and educational reforms. She is also .the founding director of the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities, a partnership between Stanford University and Bay Area communities to build new practices, knowledge, and capacity for youth development and learning.

Monique Nakagawa is a research associate at the Public Research Institute (PRI) at San Francisco State University. Raised in San Francisco’s Visitacion Valley, her interests lie at the intersection of poverty, environment, and quality of life; neighborhood knowledge; community indicators; and participatory research. Before joining PRI in 2000, she worked with low-income and minority communities on grassroots community development in San Francisco’s Chinatown and Sixth Street Corridor, where she was an active member of the South of Market Problem Solving Council, a community-based participatory decision-making body. Nakagawa also has many years of involvement with cooperatives and collectives. She holds a master’s degree in geography from San Francisco State.

Pedro Noguera, Ph.D., is a professor in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University. He is also the executive director of the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education and the codirector of the Institute for the Study of Globalization and Education in Metropolitan Settings. An urban sociologist, Noguera’s scholarship and research focus on the ways in which schools are influenced by social and economic conditions in the urban environment. He has served as an adviser to and engaged in collaborative research with several large urban school districts throughout the United States. He has conducted research on issues related to education as well as economic and social development in the Caribbean, Latin America, and several other countries. Between 2000 and 2003, Noguera served as the Judith K. Dimon Professor of Communities and Schools at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. From 1990 to 2000 he was a professor in Social and Cultural Studies at the Graduate School of Education and the director of the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of California at Berkeley.

Theresa L. Osypuk is a social epidemiologist who researches racial, socioeconomic, and nativity disparities in health, their geographic patterns, and causes. She is particularly interested in why place affects health and health disparities, including the role of racial residential segregation, neighborhood context, and social policies. Osypuk’s research has appeared in leading epidemiology, social epidemiology, public health, and urban studies journals. She received her doctorate and master’s from the Harvard School of Public Health, and her postdoctoral training in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholars fellowship at the University of Michigan during 2005 through 2007. Osypuk is currently assistant professor at the Bouvé College of Health Sciences at Northeastern University in Boston.

Manuel Pastor is professor of American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California, where he also serves as director of the Program for Environmental and Regional Equity at the Center for Sustainable Cities and codirector of the Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration. Founding director of the Center for Justice, Tolerance, and Community at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Pastor holds a doctorate in economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has received fellowships from the Danforth, Guggenheim, and Kellogg foundations, and grants from the Irvine, Rockefeller, Hewlett, and Ford foundations as well as from the National Science Foundation, the California Environmental Protection Agency, the California Wellness Foundation, and many others. He served as a member of the Commission on Regions, appointed by California’s Speaker of the State Assembly, and is currently a member of the Regional Targets Advisory Committee for the California Air Resources Board. In recent years Pastor’s research has focused on the economic, environmental, and social conditions facing low-income urban communities in the United States. He has written two books: This Could Be the Start of Something Big: Social Movements for Regional Equity and the Future of Metropolitan America, with Chris Benner and Martha Matsuoka; and Uncommon Common Ground: Race and America’s Future, with Angela Glover Blackwell and Stewart Kwoh.

David J. Pate Jr. is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Helen Bader School of Social Welfare. His fields of special interest are welfare reform policy; child support enforcement policy; fatherhood; domestic violence; and the intersection of race, gender, and poverty. He has more than twenty-five years of direct service, management, and policy experience in the field of social work. Pate’s research projects involve the use of qualitative research methods to examine the relationships of noncustodial fathers of children on welfare, their interactions with their children, the child support enforcement system, the mothers of their children, and the incarceration system. He received a bachelor’s degree in social work from the University of Detroit, a master’s degree in social work from the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, and a doctorate in social welfare at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Before his appointment at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, he served as the founder and executive director of the Center for Family Policy and Practice and held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Robert Phillips leads the efforts of The California Endowment, as the director of health and human services, to develop initiatives to create efficient, effective health and human services systems that promote the health of low-income communities and communities of color. He oversees all activities for this grant-making program. Phillips also leads the Boys and Young Men of Color component of its Building Health Communities agenda, an effort to improve the health status of young males and their families. Before joining The California Endowment in 2006, Phillips was a principal at Carter Phillips LLC, a public affairs firm that specializes in strategic communications and public affairs consulting; a senior associate at PolicyLink, a national nonprofit research and advocacy organization; a capital strategies regional coordinator and political coordinator and organizer for the Service Employees International Union in Oakland, California, and Washington D.C.; and a senior health policy analyst for the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C.. Phillips received a B.A. from Morehouse College in Atlanta, an M.P.A from the Maxwell School of Citizen and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, and an M.P.H. from Harvard University’s School of Public Health.

Lisa Quay is an education policy associate at the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity, and Diversity at the School of Law, University of California, Berkeley. Previously, she worked at the Bridgespan Group with a variety of education clients, including one of the nation’s largest private foundations and a leading national child advocacy association. As a research assistant at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., Quay worked on large-scale policy evaluations, including the widely cited national evaluation of abstinence-only education programs. She received her bachelor’s degree in sociology with highest honors from Oberlin College.

Belinda Reyes is the director of the César Chávez Institute and associate professor of the Latina/o Studies Department at the College of Ethnic Studies of San Francisco State University. She was formerly an assistant professor and founding faculty member at the School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts at the University of California at Merced and a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. Her publications include Holding the Line? The Effect of the Recent Border Build-up on Unauthorized Immigration; Taking the Oath: An Analysis of Naturalization in California and the United States; and A Portrait of Race and Ethnicity in California: An Assessment of Social and Economic Well-being. In Systems of Elections, Latino Representation, and Student Outcomes in Central California and Faculty, Managers, and Administrators in the University of California, 1996 to 2002, Reyes has explored ethnic diversity in higher education and K–12 and the potential consequences of underrepresentation. Her research focuses on the policy issues confronting the Latino and immigrant population in the United States. She has been a senior program associate at PolicyLink, a research fellow at the University of Michigan, and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Reyes holds a B.S. in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley.

John A. Rich was medical director for the Boston Public Health Commission before joining Drexel University’s School of Public Health. He oversaw the clinical functions of the commission and developed initiatives to address emerging health problems. He was also associate professor of medicine and public health at Boston University and served as an attending physician at Boston Medical Center. Rich is an expert in inner-city health problems, particularly urban violence, men’s health, and racial disparities. He is the founder and director of the Young Men’s Health Clinic at Boston Medical Center. He serves as principal investigator on a number of CDC-funded grants, including REACH Elders and Steps to a Healthy Boston. He received his bachelor’s degree in English from Dartmouth College, his medical degree from Duke University Medical School, and completed his residency in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. Rich also holds a master’s degree in public health from the Harvard School of Public Health. He helped establish the Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice at the Drexel University School of Public Health. In 2006 he was awarded a MacArthur grant for his work addressing the primary health-care needs of young men in the inner city.

Linda Rich is the director of research at the Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice and the Healing Hurt People program at Drexel University’s College of Medicine. She has more than twenty-five years of experience in psychotherapy, research, health policy analysis, and program planning. Her previous work at the Best Practices Institute focused on the creation of a training and professional development institute for a large-scale community-based parenting network; guiding a grant-request and funding process; and establishing a standardized evaluation system for parenting education and support programs using performance measures as evaluation tools. Rich has worked in a range of nonprofit organizations in the human services field as a direct service provider (psychologist) in women’s health and mental health settings, at the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Children’s Policy, in the National Health and Human Services Program at the Pew Charitable Trusts, and as a consultant for the Ford Foundation and the United Way of Southeastern Pennsylvania. She holds a master’s degree in community psychology from Temple University and a bachelor’s degree from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

Lindsay E. Rosenfeld is a social epidemiologist with research interests in program and policy design that focus on the health impacts of “nonhealth” policies and programs, particularly concerning the built environment, urban planning and design, housing, neighborhoods, education, (im)migration, and health literacy. Her new team focuses on the social determinants of health and racial/ethnic health disparities at Northeastern University’s Institute on Urban Health Research. She is an associate research scientist and an adjunct faculty member at Northeastern, where she teaches a course on race, ethnicity, and health. Rosenfeld is also a research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, where she focuses on health literacy. Throughout her career she has served in numerous research, policy, teaching, and community social-service capacities—passionate about translating research into policy. These include being a founding member of the Boston Child Health Impact Assessment Working Group, a second-grade teacher in Compton, California, and cofounder and coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Consortium on Urban Planning and Public Health. Rosenfeld earned her bachelor’s degree in women’s studies from Brown University and her master’s degree and doctorate in public health from the Harvard School of Public Health.

Jorge Ruiz de Velasco is program officer for Educational Opportunity and Scholarship at the Ford Foundation. Previously he was the associate director and director of education at the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity, and Diversity at Berkeley Law at the University of California. The focus of his work is on the study and promotion of change in public schools and community colleges, the implications of education reform for disadvantaged students, education law and policy, and the effect of immigration on schools and communities. Before his Berkeley appointment, Ruiz de Velasco served as director of the Institute for Research on Education Policy and Practice at the Stanford School of Education. He has also served as a senior program officer at the James Irvine Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; as a senior research associate at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C.; and as a civil rights attorney for the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). He holds a doctorate in political science and a master’s degree in education administration and policy analysis from Stanford University, a law degree from the Berkeley School of Law at the University of California, and a bachelor’s degree (cum laude) in government from Harvard University. He is a member of the California Bar.

Andrea Russi is the Executive Director for the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice. Prior to joining BCCJ, Andrea spent nearly eight years as a federal prosecutor at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. She handled both trial and appellate work in a wide variety of criminal cases, with a focus on child exploitation cases. Russi argued more than twenty cases before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and worked on numerous high profile appeals, including the first major prosecution of the Mexican Mafia prison gang. Andrea has also been an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, teaching appellate advocacy and advanced legal writing. Prior to her work as a federal prosecutor, Andrea was an associate at the law firm of Latham & Watkins in Los Angeles. Andrea clerked for the Honorable William D. Keller of the United States District Court for the Central District of California and for the Honorable David R. Thompson of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. During law school, Andrea served as Editor-in-Chief of the UCLA Law Review.

Carol J. Silverman joined the research staff of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice in October 2009. She previously served as Research Director of the Center for Self Help Research (CSHR) at the Public Health Institute, Berkeley, California, and also The Institute of Nonprofit Organization Management at the University of San Francisco (INOM). At CSHR, she served as the co-principal investigator on a series of studies funded by the National Institute of Health/Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Agency, which studied the effectiveness of services operated for people with a mental health diagnosis by similarly diagnosed people. As a part of this research, she spent a year conducting field observations at drop in centers that served people who were homeless, often with dual substance abuse and mental health diagnoses. At INOM, she supervised a series of studies benefiting nonprofits and philanthropy and provided data consultation to a number of foundations including the California Endowment, the East Bay Community Foundation, and the San Francisco Community Foundation. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Berkeley and was a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Social Welfare. She has published extensively in the fields of housing, mental health and nonprofits and foundations.

Natalie Slopen is a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Center on the Developing Child. She recently completed her doctorate in the Department of Society, Human Development, and Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. Her research focuses on socioeconomic, racial, and gender disparities in health, and how early life conditions influence mental and physical health over the life course. Slopen’s dissertation research focused on social and economic determinants of mental health among children, adolescents, and adults. She has also carried out research that examines associations between early life adversities and cardiovascular disease risk factors in adulthood. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Center on the Developing Child, Slopen engages in research on the biological and psychological effects of early stress and the mechanisms by which these experiences are embedded to create long-term mental and physical health risks. The long-term goal is to identify processes and conditions that can be targeted by interventions to reduce health disparities and promote child health. Slopen has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Toronto and a master’s degree in social sciences from the University of Chicago.

James Diego Vigil is a professor in the School of Social Ecology at the University of California at Irvine. His education includes a doctorate and a master’s degree in anthropology from the University of California at Los Angeles. He has taught or held administrative positions as a visiting professor at Harvard University, as a professor of anthropology and director of the Center for the Study of Urban Poverty at UCLA for five years, and as a professor of anthropology and director of ethnic studies at the University of Southern California for fifteen years. His expertise is in urban street youth, urban psychology, socialization, and educational anthropology, as well as in the ethnohistory of Mexico and the southwestern United States. He has written several books: From Indians to Chicanos: The Dynamics of Mexican American Culture; Personas Mexicanas: Chicano High Schoolers in a Changing Los Angeles; Barrio Gangs: Street Life and Identity in Southern California; A Rainbow of Gangs: Street Cultures in the Mega-City; The Projects: Gang and Non-Gang Families in East Los Angeles; and Gang Redux. Vigil also acts as a consultant and an expert witness in cultural defense in gang-related homicides.

Jeffrey M. Vincent is deputy director and cofounder of the Center for Cities & Schools at the University of California at Berkeley. The center works to promote high-quality education as an essential component of urban and metropolitan vitality to create equitable, healthy, and sustainable cities and schools for all. Vincent has a doctorate in city and regional planning from Berkeley and a master’s degree in community and regional planning from the University of Nebraska. His research interests lie at the intersection of land use planning, community development, and educational improvement, with a particular focus on how school facilities serve as educational and neighborhood assets. Recent research has looked at issues school facility siting and design, housing and neighborhood redevelopment, state policies on school construction, joint use of schools, youth engagement in redevelopment, and transit-oriented development aimed at families. Vincent’s research has appeared in numerous academic journals including and he is a contributor to Segregation: The Rising Costs for America and School Siting and Healthy Communities: Why Where We Invest in School Facilities Matters. Vincent is also a researcher with Building Educational Success Together (BEST), a national collaborative working to improve public school facilities.

David R. Williams is the Florence and Laura Norman Professor of Public Health at the Harvard School of Public Health and a professor of sociology, African studies, and African American studies at Harvard University. His first six years as a faculty member were at Yale University; he spent fourteen years at the University of Michigan. Williams holds an M.P.H. from Loma Linda University and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan. He is an internationally recognized authority on the social influences on health and has special expertise in socioeconomic and racial disparities in health, the effects of racism on health, and the ways in which religious involvement can affect health. Williams is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2004 he received one of the inaugural Decade of Behavior Research Awards, and he has been a member of the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health as well as staff director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Commission to Build a Healthier America. The Journal of Black Issues in Higher Education ranked Williams as the Most Cited Black Scholar in the Social Sciences in 2008.

Ann Wilson is the project coordinator at the Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice. Previously, she worked for Philadelphia Health Management Corporation (PHMC), providing consultative services to the City of Philadelphia’s Department of Human Services, with a focus on parenting education and support programs. While with PHMC, Wilson administered and helped establish the Institute for Family Professionals, a professional development institute for social service professionals who work with parents and caregivers in community-based settings in Philadelphia. Her prior experience includes Health and Human Services grant making at the Pew Charitable Trusts and arts administration at the University of the Arts. Wilson graduated from the Catholic University of America, where she studied English literature and piano.

Alford Young, Jr. is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on three general areas, all of which concern the phenomenon of race or the social experiences of African Americans, and all of which employ ethnographic interview-based research methods. He is currently engaged in a series of projects on urban-based, low-income African American men. Through the course of these studies, he is exploring how these men conceive of work opportunity and the world of work in modern society, what they argue to be notions of the ideal fatherhood, and how they conceive of appropriate mentoring for younger relatives and associates. Young is also conducting a study of how African American scholars who research and teach about the African American experience address issues concerning the social utility of their scholarship and how that relates to their sense of mission and purpose as academics. In addition, he is involved in a few small-scale studies of undergraduate and graduate educational practice as it pertains to racial and ethnic diversity in the student body and in scholarship. Young received his doctorate from the University of Chicago.