Speakers' Bios for Plenary Sessions
Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst
Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst was appointed in November 2002 to a six-year term as the first Director of the Institute of Education Sciences—the research, evaluation, and statistics arm of the U.S. Department of Education. The Institute includes the National Center for Education Statistics, the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, the National Center for Education Research, and the National Center for Special Education Research. Dr. Whitehurst previously served as Assistant Secretary for the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, the predecessor to the Institute.
Just prior to beginning federal service, Dr. Whitehurst was Leading Professor of Psychology and Pediatrics and Chairman of the Department of Psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He also served on the faculty of the University of New South Wales in Australia and was Academic Vice President of the Merrill-Palmer Institute in Detroit. He was editor-in-chief of two leading scientific journals in his field: The Merrill-Palmer Quarterly of Behavior and Development, and Developmental Review.
During his career as a researcher, Dr. Whitehurst was the author or editor of five books and published more than 100 scholarly papers on language and pre-reading development in children. One of the techniques he developed, dialogic reading, is a widely used method of shared picture book reading that enhances children's language development. His work to identify preschool predictors of reading achievement has influenced curriculum for Head Start and pre-K programs and has led to the development of screening instruments to identify children with low levels of reading readiness. Throughout his academic career, his research focused on the development of knowledge and programs that might have a direct influence on the lives of children and families. Those goals continue in his role as Institute director.
Dr. Whitehurst is the 2007 recipient of the prestigious Peter H. Rossi Award, given by the Association for Public Policy and Management for contributions to the theory or practice of program evaluation.
Gary Taubes
Gary Taubes is the author of Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control and Disease (Knopf, 2007).
Taubes studied applied physics as an undergraduate at Harvard and has masters' degrees in engineering from Stanford University (1978) and journalism from Columbia University (1981). He began writing and reporting on science and medicine for Discover magazine in 1982. As a free-lance journalist, he's written for Science, where he's been a contributing correspondent since 1993, for The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Playboy (a memoir of his short-lived boxing career, among other things) and a host of other publications. Taubes has won numerous awards for his reporting including the International Health Reporting Award from the Pan American Health Organization and the National Association of Science Writers Science in Society Journalism Award, which he won in 1996, 1999 and 2001. He is the only print journalist to win this award three times. Since the mid-1980s, Taubes has focused his reporting on controversial science, on the difficult job of establishing reliable knowledge in any field of inquiry, and on the scientific tools and methodology needed to do so. His earlier books include Nobel Dreams (Random House 1987), and Bad Science, The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion (Random House, 1993), a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Awards.