Yidan Prize/Working Paper Author Bios
Introduction: Carol Dweck & David Yeager
Paper #1: Teacher Mindsets & Practices
Mary Murphy, Lead Author
Mary Murphy is the Herman B. Wells Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Associate Vice Provost for Diversity and Inclusion at Indiana University. In the area of education, her research illuminates the situational cues—like faculty and institutional mindset—that influence students' academic motivation and achievement with an emphasis on understanding when those processes are similar and different for majority and minority students. She develops, implements, and evaluates social psychological interventions that reduce identity threat and spur students' motivation, persistence, and performance. Mary is a co-founder of the College Transition Collaborative, a research-practice partnership aimed to increase student success through social psychological interventions. Her research has been profiled in The New York Times, Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Scientific American, and NPR, among other outlets.
Stephanie Fryberg, Lead Author
Dr. Stephanie A. Fryberg is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. As a social and cultural psychologist, her primary research interests focus on how social representations of race, culture, and social class influence the development of self, psychological well-being, physical health, and educational attainment.
​Dr. Fryberg provided testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs regarding the impact of racist stereotypes on Indigenous people, served as an expert witness in the Keepseagle v. USDA class action lawsuit, and consults with National Tribal TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families). She also received the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues Louise Kidder Early Career Award, the University of Arizona Five Star Faculty Award, and in 2011 was inducted into the Multicultural Alumni Hall of Fame at Stanford University.
Laura Brady is an Associate Research Scientist and the Executive Director of the Research for Indigenous Social Action and Equity (RISE) Center at the University of Michigan. By integrating theories from social and cultural psychology and education, Dr. Brady's research explores cultural, social, institutional, and interpersonal processes that perpetuate racial, gender, and social class inequalities in schools and in society at large. Dr. Brady takes her research outside of the lab by partnering with practitioners, activists, and changemakers to develop and test interventions that target the causes of inequality and produce meaningful change for people who are historically disadvantaged by powerful social systems and institutions.
Elizabeth Canning
Dr. Elizabeth Canning is an Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department at Washington State University. She completed her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2016. Her research focuses on understanding how to create equitable and inclusive contexts that encourage motivation, persistence, and achievement for all groups. Currently, she is conducting laboratory experiments, randomized classroom interventions, and longitudinal field studies investigating the effects of faculty mindset beliefs and practices on students' motivation and achievement.
Cameron Hecht
Cameron A. Hecht, PhD, is an NSF postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin in the Population Research Center. He conducts laboratory and field experiments to understand the motivational dynamics that influence students' engagement, interest, and performance in academic contexts. He also tests interventions designed to enhance motivation and remove psychological barriers in these settings. In his research, Dr. Hecht examines how social-psychological interventions can promote equitable outcomes, attending to the mechanisms that explain these effects and evaluating whether and how these effects persist over time. He also studies the contextual factors that amplify or reduce the effects of these interventions. He earned his PhD in social psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2020, his MA in the social sciences from the University of Chicago in 2013, and his BA in philosophy from the University of Vermont in 2012.
Paper #2: Research Design & Infrastructure
Elizabeth Tipton, Lead Author
Dr. Elizabeth Tipton is an Associate Professor of Statistics and Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. She is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics and is on the Editorial Boards of Psychological Bulletin, Research Synthesis Methods, and Observational Studies. She is also Co-Director of the Statistics for Evidence Based Policy and Practice (STEPP) Center. Her work has been funded by the Institute for Education Sciences, the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation and the Raikes Foundation. While a member of the faculty at Teachers College, Columbia University, Elizabeth received Early Career Awards from the American Education Research Association, the Society for Research Synthesis Methods, and the American Psychological Association. She is the 2020 recipient of the Campbell Collaboration's Frederick Mosteller Award for an important contribution to the theory, method, or practice of systematic reviewing. Elizabeth received a Ph.D. in Statistics from Northwestern in 2011.
Larry Hedges, Lead Author
Dr. Larry V. Hedges is Board of Trustees Professor of Statistics at Northwestern University with appointments as a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, the School of Education & Social Policy the Department of Psychology, and the Weinberg School of Medicine. He is also Co-Director of the Statistics for Evidence Based Policy and Practice (STEPP) Center. Larry is an elected member of the National Academy of Education and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Statistical Association, the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the American Educational Research Association. He co-founded the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness and was honored by the establishment of the annual Hedges Lecture in 2016. Larry received the Yidan Prize for Education Research in 2018. Prior to Northwestern, he was the Stella M. Rowley Distinguished Service Professor of Education, Sociology, Psychology, and Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. He received a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1980.
Maithreyi Gopalan
Maithreyi Gopalan is Assistant Professor of Education and Public Policy at Penn State. She earned a doctorate in Public Affairs from Indiana University, Bloomington. She engages in interdisciplinary, policy-relevant, social science research exploring the causes and consequences of racial and socioeconomic disparities in student outcomes using experimental and quasi-experimental research methods. Specifically, she has applied psychological insights to analyze social and educational policy issues affecting child and adolescent development.
Jared Murray
Dr. Jared S. Murray joined The University of Texas at Austin in 2017 as an Assistant Professor. He was previously a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University. His current research interests are in developing flexible Bayesian multivariate models for heterogenous and structured data, with applications to multiple imputation for missing data, latent variable modeling, and causal inference. He was recently awarded an NSF grant, "Improving Probabilistic Record Linkage and Subsequent Inference," to develop new methods for matching records across files in the absence of unique identifiers, and for making inference using the combined files.
David Yeager
Dr. Yeager is interested in understanding the processes shaping adolescent development, especially how social cognitive factors interact with structural and physiological factors to create positive or negative trajectories for youth. He is also interested in learning how to influence these psychological processes, so as to improve developmental and educational outcomes for youth. He frequently collaborates with PERTS and has an appointment at the UT Dana Center. Additionally, he is a Fellow at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, where he works on their mathematics pathway initiatives. He also a member of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group and the New Paths to Purpose Network, and a Faculty Research Associate at the University of Texas Population Research Center.
Paper #3: Science of Teacher Behavior Change
Christopher Bryan, Lead Author
David Blazar
David Blazar is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland College Park in the department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership. His research focuses on teacher and teaching quality, including their measurement and the efficacy of interventions aimed at improving both. Recent projects examine the effect of – teachers on students' social and behavioral development, diversity amongst teachers and other professional staff, teacher coaching programs as a professional development tool, and Common Core-aligned textbooks as an instructional resource for teachers. Dr. Blazar received the Jean Flanigan Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Association for Education Finance and Policy and the Excellence on Scholarship Pre-Tenure Award from the College of Education at the University of Maryland. He received his doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in quantitative policy analysis in education with a disciplinary focus in economics. He also holds an Ed.M. in policy and management from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a B.A. in history and literature from Harvard College. Prior to graduate school, he taught high-school English Language Arts in New York City.
Matthew Kraft
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. His primary work focuses on efforts to improve educator and organizational effectiveness in K–12 urban public schools. He has published on topics including teacher coaching, teacher professional growth, teacher evaluation, teacher-parent communication, teacher layoffs, social and emotional skills, school working conditions, and extended learning time. Previously, he taught 8th grade English in Oakland USD and 9th grade humanities at Berkeley High School in California. He holds a doctorate in Quantitative Policy Analysis in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education as well as a master's in International Comparative Education and a B.A. in International Relations from Stanford University.
Oddny Solheim
Oddny Judith Solheim is a Professor in Special Needs Education at the Norwegian Centre for Reading Education and Research, University of Stavanger. Her research focuses on instructional practices that can increase student learning and engagement, and how such practices can be adopted by teachers. She has a specific focus on literacy instruction and students at risk for reading difficulties. Solheim is co-director of Synapse Lab, a cross-disciplinary lab at the University of Stavanger conducting large scale field experiments investigating motivation and learning in education and work-life.
Paper #4: Measurement af Mindset, Practice, and Classroom Culture
Kali Trzesniewski, Lead Author
Kali Trzesniewski is a Specialist in Cooperative Extension and Associate Director of Research for the Statewide 4-H Youth Development Program at the University of California (UC), Davis and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources. She studies the development of self-perceptions across the lifespan with more recent work focused on improving self-perceptions and non-cognitive skills in children, adolescents, and young adults with the goal of increasing their achievement and work outcomes. She writes curriculum, designs and evaluates interventions locally and globally, conducts basic research, and seeks to improve measurement across literacy levels and diverse contexts. She has worked with communities in the US, Indonesia, South Africa, and Jordan.
David Yeager, Lead Author
Diego Catalán Molina
Diego Catalán Molina holds a PhD in Human Development from the University of California (UC), Davis. He studies how, when, and for whom socioemotional school interventions work. Before starting graduate training at UC Davis, he worked in Chile as a school counselor at a low-income school, an advisor to school counselors and psychologists at network of charter schools, and an evaluator for the national agency that monitors education quality across the country.
Susana Claro
Susana was an economics of education doctoral student from Chile. She's a Research collaborator at PERTS (Project for Education Research that Scales). Her research interests focus on low income students, teachers, and socio-emotional skills. Her advisors were Susanna Loeb and Carol Dweck. Susana is the co-founder of Enseña Chile, which is part of the Teach for All network since 2008. Prior to that, she was advisor of the Secretary of Education in Chile to help schools recover from the earthquake and worked on developing collaborative software for classrooms in different schools around the world. She is member of Advisory Boards of Comunidad Mujer, the Global Learning Lab at Teach for All, Impulso Docente, and others. She has taught students in the US and Chile from K-16. She graduated as a civil engineer and computer scientist from Chile, and earned a Masters in Education from Harvard University. Currently, she works as an Assistant Professor at the School of Government at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
Catherine Oberle
Catherine Oberle received her Bachelor of Science in Human Development from UC Davis and currently is pursuing a Master of Science in Child Development, also at UCD. She studies socioemotional learning outcomes in elementary- and middle-school students. She is especially interested in program and curriculum development and evaluation, and has consulted on the development several socioemotional interventions with the World Bank.