Kunfeng Pan is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at Renmin University of China. His recent research focuses on poverty alleviation and education inequality with a focus on the role of higher education institutions in promoting rural development in poverty-stricken areas and bridging social inequalities. He has also focused on the inequality in parenting worldwide, and the enhancing family wellbeing policy. He serves as a consultant expert in the planning department at the ministry of education of China. He has his Ph. D in Economics of Education from Peking University and a B.S. in Physics from Peking University. He was a visiting professor at Cook Center at Duke University for the 2019-2020 academic year and taught a Duke Immerse course named China and Higher Education Access. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge in the UK, and Hokkaido University in Japan.

Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein is an Associate Professor of Population Health Sciences and core faculty in the Samuel Dubois Cook Center on Social Equity . She is a national expert in examining how the criminal legal system impacts people, families, and communities. During the pandemic, she co-founded the COVID Prison Project, one of the only national data projects that tracks and analyzes COVID testing, cases, and deaths in prison systems across the country. She utilized the infrastructure of the COVID Prison Project to recently launch the Third City Project—a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded big data project that tracks and aggregates publicly available health and health policy data from carceral systems. Additionally, Dr. Brinkley-Rubinstein is the PI of several NIH and foundation grants focused on substance use, HIV prevention, and mortality. In 2019, she co-edited a special issue of AJPH that explored how mass incarceration is a socio-structural determinant of health and more recently was invited by the National Academy of Medicine to attend its Annual Emerging Leaders Forum. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, ProPublica, CNN, Science Magazine, and other media outlets. Her work blends research and policy, which has recently culminated in providing expert consultation to congress relevant to prison standards and data reporting.

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Lauren Russell is a researcher at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington, D.C., focusing on topics related to racial disparities. She was previously a visiting research associate at the Cook Center during her Ph.D. candidacy. Her research interests lie in labor economics and public finance, with a focus on the intersections of poverty, race, inequality, and gender. She is specifically interested in neighborhood sorting, neighborhood effects, and U.S housing policy. She earned a Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard University, an M.A. in economics from Duke University, and a B.A. in classics with a minor in economics from Harvard University.

Dr. Gennetian is an applied economist whose research straddles a variety of topics that fall under the umbrella of child poverty focused on the economic behavior of parents and households, the implications on children’s development, and the ways in which children and families are affected by resources provided and experiences with social policies and programs.  Her work embraces multi- and inter-disciplinary frameworks drawing upon a rich history of collaboration with scholars across fields of child development, economics, neuroscience, political science, and sociology. She is a PI on the first multi-site multi-year randomized control study of a monthly unconditional cash transfer to low income mothers of infants in the U.S. called Baby’s First Years. Her recent work bridges poverty scholarship with advances in insights from behavioral economics to the arena of children’s development.

My weight control research focuses on reducing disparities in obesity prevalence, and obesity prevention and treatment intervention outcomes in black women. As an InCHIP Affiliate, I will develop research using qualitative, quantitative and intervention methods to understand why black women experience subpar outcomes in weight control interventions. Prior to UConn, I conducted a comparative effectiveness study using a randomized control design to test how the standard behavioral weight loss treatment approach may be enhanced to produce better outcomes in black women.

Dr. Malik S. Henfield is a Full Professor and Founding Dean of the Institute for Racial Justice at Loyola University Chicago (scheduled to launch Fall 2021). He received a BA in Biology from Francis Marion University, a MEd and EdS in School Counseling from The University of South Carolina, and a PhD in Counselor Education from The Ohio State University.

Dr. Henfield has published multiple scholarly manuscripts and books, and delivered numerous national, regional, state, and local keynote addresses and professional presentations. His scholarship situates Black students’ lived experiences in a broader ecological milieu to critically explore how their personal, social, academic, and career success is impeded and enhanced by school, family, and community contexts. His work to date has focused heavily on the experiences of Black students formally identified as gifted/high-achieving while his latest projects focus more exclusively on developing, implementing, and evaluating in- and out-of-school interventions associated with developing Black students ready to succeed in college and careers.

As a counselor educator, Professor Henfield also has a fundamental belief in mental health as a key component in meeting students’ needs and is, therefore, committed to diversifying the counseling profession as a means to help the profession better reflect current demographics. To that end, he also researches underrepresented students’ (Black and international students) experiences in counselor training programs as a means to uncover the connection between programmatic factors and positive student outcomes and experiences, which has direct implications for increased diversity in the counseling profession. He has consulted on these topics at Atlanta Public School District, Baltimore City Public School District, Oakland Unified School District, and San Francisco Unified School District, and many other school districts and community stakeholders across the country on topics related to his scholarly interests.

Over the years, Dr. Henfield has been widely recognized for his scholarship and service including winning the American Education Research Association (AERA) Division E Research Paper of the Year Award, the Chi Sigma Iota International Honor Society’s Outstanding Article Award, and the Outstanding Research Award from the North Central Association for Counselor Education and Supervision (NCACES). In terms of leadership recognition, he was named an Emerging Leader by the Phi Delta Kappa (PDK) International Education Association, a Young Academic Fellow by the Institute for Higher Education and the Lumina Foundation, and was elected Chair of one of AERA’s largest Special Interest Groups (SIG), the Critical Examination of Race, Ethnicity, Class, and Gender in Education (2018-2021).

His research has resulted in millions of dollars of external funding including, most recently a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant focused on increasing the number of students of color entering computer science professions and an Institute of Education Sciences (IES) grant aimed at determining the extent to which school districts provide equity and excellence in their gifted education programming.

Dr. Martin P. Smith blazed his own path by first fusing his passion for education and sport at the University of California at Berkeley. He earned his bachelor’s (‘06) and master’s (‘07) degrees in education while playing basketball for the Golden Bears. At Berkeley, he won the 2006 Jake Gimbell Award which honors the student most committed to academic and athletic excellence. After matriculating at Berkeley, he worked in San Diego’s inner city, teaching geometry at Lincoln High School and adult education at San Diego Community College. He also established the Phil Smith Basketball Camp to honor his late father, NBA All-Star Phil Smith, using basketball as a means to promote academic achievement. In pursuit of his passions, Dr. Smith has traveled extensively, directing basketball clinics in China, the Philippines, and Panama. Furthermore, he was the Lead Teacher’s Assistant at the University of Cape Town, South Africa facilitating a course examining the effects of apartheid and American segregation on contemporary Black, urban economic development. He completed his Ph.D. in Cultural Studies in Education at The University of Texas at Austin. He then conducted post-doctoral research in Spanish at UT’s Mesoamerica Center in Antigua, Guatemala, studying the amalgamation of race, culture, education, and athletics. After leaving Guatemala, he joined the faculty at Duke University where he is currently an Assistant Professor of Education.

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