President Obama has named two Institute of Education Sciences (IES) grantees as recipients of the prestigious Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). The PECASE awards are the highest honor given by the U.S. Government to science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.
Daphna Bassok (left in picture), of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, and Shayne Piasta (right in picture), of the College of Education and Human Ecology at The Ohio State University, were nominated for the award by the leadership of IES. They are two of 102 award recipients announced by the White House on January 9, 2017.
The awards, established by President Clinton in 1996, are coordinated by the Office of Science and Technology Policy within the Executive Office of the President. The White House said: “the awardees are selected for their pursuit of innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology and their commitment to community service as demonstrated through scientific leadership, public education, or community outreach.”
Bassok and Piasta have both served as principal investigators, and as co-principal investigators on projects funded through IES’ National Center for Education Research (NCER). Both are committed to understanding and improving early childhood education, and work closely with state systems to answer critical questions as the states roll out systemic changes to the provision of early childhood education.
Dr. Bassok is an associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Virginia and is also the associate director of EdPolicyWorks a joint collaboration between the Curry School of Education and the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. Her research addresses early childhood education policy, with a particular focus on the impacts of policy interventions on the well-being of low-income children. Dr. Bassok is currently the principal investigator of Building State-wide Quality Rating Strategies for Early Childhood System Reform: Lessons From the Development of Louisiana's Kindergarten Readiness System, and was co-principal investigator for a project which examined links between policy and availability of early childhood care and education in the United States.
Dr. Piasta is an associate professor of reading and literature in early and middle childhood in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Ohio State. She also is a faculty associate for the Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy. Her research focuses on early literacy development and how it is best supported during preschool and elementary years. Dr. Piasta is the principal investigator of the Evaluation of the Effectiveness of the Ohio Department of Education's Literacy Core Curriculum for Early Childhood Educators. She has also been co-principal investigator on several other IES-funded projects, including The Language Bases of Reading Comprehension, one of the six Reading for Understanding Research Initiative projects. Dr. Piasta received her doctoral training as an IES Predoctoral Fellow at Florida State University.
Written by Elizabeth Albro, Associate Commissioner for Teaching and Learning, NCER
Pictures courtesy of grantees