Secretary Cardona previously served as the Commissioner of Education in Connecticut, a position he held after being appointed by Governor Ned Lamont in August 2019. In this position, he faced the unprecedented challenge of responding to the COVID-19 pandemic and led the safe school reopening efforts in Connecticut. To do so, Secretary Cardona and his Department provided school districts with the balance of guidance, local autonomy, and oversight needed to ensure equitable and meaningful educational opportunities for students while also prioritizing public health mitigation measures. Secretary Cardona and the State of Connecticut focused on equity by arranging for student access to technology to support remote learning, helping the state become the first in the nation to provide learning devices to fulfill the identified need for all students. Recognizing the increased importance of providing resources for the social-emotional health of students and staff, Secretary Cardona and his team collaborated with the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and other stakeholders to provide free social and emotional learning courses.

Secretary Cardona's approach to leadership in Connecticut focused on partnerships: within his Education Department; between State agencies; and with local boards, educator unions, school administrator associations, child advocates, and most importantly, students and families. He attributes his success in Connecticut in part to the strong backing of those partners, as well as support from the members of the Connecticut State Board of Education and his staff at the Connecticut State Department of Education.

Under Secretary Cardona's oversight — despite the pandemic — Connecticut launched a statewide FAFSA Data Dashboard; procured a comprehensive statewide Special Education Data System (CT-SEDS); announced the State's highest ever extended graduation rates for students with disabilities and English Learners; reached a new stipulated agreement in the landmark school integration case Sheff v. O'Neill, established the first national requirement for high schools provide courses on black and Latino studies; and initiated systemic improvement protocols that can reach every corner of the state. His focus on equity and excellence for all learners has driven his work at all levels.

Secretary Cardona has two decades of experience as a public school educator from the City of Meriden. He began his career as an elementary teacher. He then served as a school principal in Meriden in 2003 where he led a school with outstanding programming for three to five-year-olds, students that were bilingual, and students with sensory exceptionalities. He proudly served in this role for ten years. In 2012, Miguel won the 2012 National Distinguished Principal Award for the State of CT and the Outstanding Administrator Award from UCONN's NEAG School of Education. Secretary Cardona then transitioned to lead the work of Performance and Evaluation in the district. He then assumed the role of Assistant Superintendent for Teaching and Learning, overseeing teaching, learning, and leadership alignment.

A lifelong Meriden resident, Dr. Cardona attended Meriden Connecticut Public Schools and graduated from Wilcox Technical High School. He attended CCSU for his Bachelor's degree and UCONN where he completed a Master's in Bilingual/Bicultural Education, Administrator Preparation Program, Doctorate in Education, and Executive Leadership Program (Superintendent) Certificate. Secretary Cardona is very active in his community, serving on several non-profit charitable organization boards of directors. He has had several articles published in AASPA Perspective, National School Boards Association, District Administration, and the Scholars Strategy Network.

His greatest source of pride, however, is his family. Secretary Cardona and his beautiful wife Marissa are the proud parents of two children.

Before joining IES, Mark Schneider was a vice president and an Institute Fellow at American Institutes for Research (AIR) and President of College Measures. Prior to joining AIR, Dr. Schneider served as Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics from 2005–2008. In 2013, the Chronicle of Higher Education selected him as one of the 10 people who had the most impact on higher education policy that year.

He is the author of numerous articles and books on education policy. His most recent book, The University Next Door, edited with KC Deane, was published in 2014 by Teachers College, Columbia University. Other books include Getting to Graduation, edited with Andrew Kelly, published in 2012 by Johns Hopkins University Press and Higher Education Accountability, edited with Kevin Carey, published by Palgrave in 2010; Charter Schools: Hope or Hype? written with Jack Buckley, was published by Princeton University Press in 2007. Schneider's 2000 book, Choosing Schools, also published by Princeton University Press, won the Policy Study Organization's Aaron Wildavsky Best Book Award.

Dr. Schneider was a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of political science at the State University of New York, Stony Brook.

Elizabeth Albro is committed to building bridges between the basic sciences of learning and education practice. Trained in the behavioral and social sciences, cognition, and communication, she received her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Chicago. Since joining IES in 2002, she has served as a program officer for multiple research portfolios and as Associate Commissioner of Teaching and Learning. She has participated on multiple interagency committees focused on open science and the federal research investment in language and communication. She has edited several books in the area of reading comprehension and has published articles in Discourse Processes, Scientific Studies of Reading, and Educational Psychology Review. Prior to joining IES, Dr. Albro was a faculty member, first at Whittier College, and subsequently at Wheaton College (Norton, MA). All of her research is grounded in her own experience as a preschool teacher in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

Dr. David J. Francis is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Chair of Quantitative Methods in the Department of Psychology at the University of Houston, where he also serves as Director of the Texas Institute for Measurement, Evaluation, and Statistics (TIMES), as well as Director of the Center for the Success of English Learners, a National Research and Development Center funded by the Institute of Education Sciences. He is a Co-Investigator on the Texas Center for Learning Disabilities, a P50 grant funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, on which he serves as PI of the Data Management and Statistics Core as well as PI of Project 1 on Classification and Identification. Dr. Francis obtained a doctoral degree in Clinical-Neuropsychology from the University of Houston in 1985 with a specialization in Quantitative Methods. He served as Chairman of the Department of Psychology from 2002 to 2014, and as Director of TIMES since its founding in 1999. He also served as Co-Director of the Texas Learning and Computation Center at the University of Houston from 2005-2012, and as Director/Co-Director of the Center for Advanced Computing and Data Science from 2015-2018.

Dr. Francis was nominated to the National Board of Education Science by President Obama and appointed to the Board by President Trump. He is a Fellow of Division 5 (Measurement, Evaluation, and Statistics) of the American Psychological Association (APA), an inaugural Fellow of the American Educational Research Association, and a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. He has served on numerous governmental advisory panels, including serving as Chairman of the Advisory Council on Education Statistics and as a member of the Independent Review Panel for the National Assessment of Title I. He served on the National Research Council’s (NRC) Board on Testing and Assessment from 2005-2017, including serving two years as Chair. He has served on several NRC consensus committees, including serving as a member of the NRC Committee on the Evaluation Framework for Successful K-12 STEM Education and serving as Chair on the 2018 report titled English Learners in STEM Subjects: Transforming Classrooms, Schools, and Lives. He also served as a member of the APA’s Taskforce on the Future of Psychology as a STEM Discipline. He was a member of the National Literacy Panel for Language Minority Children and Youth, and

served as a methodological consultant to the National Reading Panel. In 2021, he received the Hedges Lecture Award from the Society for Research in Educational Effectiveness. He was a co-recipient of the Albert J. Harris Award (2006) from the International Reading Association, and has won awards from the University of Houston for teaching (1989), and research (2007), and in 2008 received the Esther Farfel Award, the University of Houston’s highest accolade recognizing faculty excellence in teaching, research, and service over an entire career.

Dr. Francis has directed or collaborated in research on reading and reading disabilities, the education of at-risk populations, including English Language Learners and students with disabilities, as well as research on attention problems, developmental consequences of brain injuries and birth defects, adolescent alcohol abuse, and most recently on the development of methods to improve personnel selection using random effects models and the treatment of seizure disorders through electrical brain stimulation. His areas of quantitative interest include modeling of individual growth, multi-level and mixture modeling, structural equation modeling, item response theory, and exploratory data analysis. He currently collaborates on multiple contracts and grants funded by NICHD, NINDS, the Office of Naval Research, and the Institute of Education Sciences of the US Department of Education.

Kris D. Gutiérrez is Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley. She is also the Carol Liu Professor of Education and brings expertise in the learning sciences, literacy, educational policy, and qualitative and design-based approaches to inquiry. Gutiérrez is an elected member of the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Board of Directors of the National Academy of Education and the International Society of the Learning Sciences, and past president of the American Educational Research Association. Gutiérrez held a presidential appointment from President Obama to the National Board for the Institute of Education Sciences, where she served as Vice Chair.

Gutiérrez’s research employs a critical approach to the Learning Sciences and to Cultural Historical Activity Theory, examining the cultural dimensions of learning in designed learning environments, with attention to students and families from non-dominant and translingual communities. For example, her work on Third Spaces examines the affordances of syncretic approaches to literacy and learning, new media literacies, STEM learning, and the re-mediation of functional systems of learning. Her work in social design-based experiments (SDBEs) foregrounds the historical, political, and ethical dimensions of design research and our theories of learning. Gutiérrez developed this new design methodology as a democratizing form of inquiry that seeks to make the design experimentation process a co-construction between different institutional stakeholders and communities.

Key examples of longstanding collaborations with immigrant and migrant communities include Las Redes, a 15-year long after-school afterschool program that privileged translingual language practices as normative for youth, grades K-5, El Pueblo Mágico, a STEM-oriented after-school program, and the UCLA Migrant Student Leadership Program for California youth from migrant farmworker backgrounds. Her empirical studies are funded by the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Sloane Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation as co-pi on the MacArthur Funded Connected Learning Research Network and the UCLA Sloane Center for the Everyday Lives of Middle Class Families.

Gutiérrez’s research has been published widely in premier academic journals and is a co-author of Learning and Expanding With Activity Theory. Gutiérrez has won numerous awards, including the AERA Division C Sylvia Scribner Award for influencing the field of learning and instruction, the 2020 Dr. John J. Gumperz Memorial Award for Distinguished Lifetime Scholarship (LSP, AERA), the 2016 Oscar Causey award for influencing the field of literacy (LRA), the 2016 Medal of Excellence from the Columbia University/Teachers College, the 2014 Distinguished Contributions to Social Contexts in Education Research – Lifetime Achievement Award and the 2014 Henry T. Trueba Award for Research Leading to the Transformation of the Social Contexts of Education, (Division G, AERA). She was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, an AERA and NEPC Fellow, and an Osher Fellow at the Exploratorium Museum of Science. Gutiérrez received the AERA Hispanic Research in Elementary, Secondary, or Postsecondary Education Award and the Inaugural Award for Innovations in Research on Diversity in Teacher Education, Division K (AERA). She served on the U.S. Department of Education Reading First Advisory Committee and was a member of President Obama’s Education Policy Transition Team.

Joan McLaughlin, Ph.D., serves as the Commissioner of the IES National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER). As Commissioner, she has worked to strengthen the research and research training activities of the Center and initiated the competitions for NCSER's Low-Cost, Short-Duration Evaluation of Special Education Interventions, Research Networks Focused on Critical Problems of Policy and Practice in Special Education, and Research Grants Focused on Systematic Replication in Special Education. Dr. McLaughlin previously served as Deputy Commissioner of NCSER, as well as Program Officer for the Early Intervention grant portfolio. Prior to joining NCSER, she worked in the Education and Family Services area of the research consulting firm, Abt Associates; the Office of Analysis and Evaluation at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food and Nutrition Service; and in the Program Evaluation and Methodology Division of the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Dr. McLaughlin received her bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Notre Dame and her master's and Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Cornell University.

Adrienne Nishina is a Professor in the Department of Human Ecology at UC Davis. Her research focuses on peer relationships during adolescence and emerging adulthood. Specifically, she examines young people’s exposure to peers from diverse ethnic backgrounds in the context of schools, and how these critical social experiences are connected to short and longer-term academic, psychological, social, and physical well-being.

Dr. Jamie Pearson, a former behavioral interventionist and autism program consultant, is an Assistant Professor of Special Education in the Department of Teacher Education and Learning Sciences at North Carolina State University. Dr. Pearson earned her PhD in Special Education from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she developed FACES (Fostering Advocacy, Communication, Empowerment, and Support), a parent advocacy program designed to support Black families raising autistic youth. Dr. Pearson’s research focuses on: (a) disparities in autism identification, service access, and service utilization, (b) the impact of parent-advocacy and empowerment training on child and family outcomes, and (c) strategies to promote positive parent-professional partnerships between educators and historically marginalized communities.

Dr. Pearson’s FACES program is funded by a 2021 Early Career Development and Mentoring Grant from the Institute of Education Sciences (R324B210003). She is also a Co-Principal Investigator on a project designed to promote STEM career development in high school students with autism, funded by the National Science Foundation. Her work has been published in several peer-reviewed journals in the fields of special education and racial and ethnic disparities, and she has written several invited and refereed book chapters on autism, families, and racial and ethnic disparities in special education.

An applied developmental scientist by training, Dr. Reyes applies the latest innovations in human developmental science to improve practice, programming, and social policy both nationally and internationally. She possesses a broad repertoire of skills ranging from conducting rigorous research and program evaluations, developing program models impacting youth, developing assessment tools, and providing professional development opportunities for early childhood care and education staff. Dr. Reyes serves as an expert panelist on several research study committees and advisory board councils around issues of quality and equity in early education. Her primary area of interest is the promotion of social and emotional learning skills in young children. She is Director of the Climate of Healthy Interactions for Learning and Development (CHILD) program. The CHILD is a suite of tools designed to both assess and promote the quality of social and emotional interactions in early child care and education settings. Since its inception in 2016, the CHILD Tool has been implemented in at least 21 states across the US and Canada.

Lashawn Richburg-Hayes (Ph.D., economics, Princeton University), a vice president at Insight Policy Research, leads Insight’s work in education, which emphasizes finding ways to improve academic outcomes among at-risk and vulnerable students. Prior to joining Insight, she was the director of MDRC’s Young Adults and Postsecondary Education policy area, which focused on conducting randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of innovative interventions geared to improve academic success and graduation rates among low-income students in community colleges and open and broad access to 4-year universities. In her current position, in addition to conducting program evaluations, she conducts continuous improvement cycles, rapid-cycle evaluations, and leads a team that provides technical assistance to state education agencies and local education agencies. Dr. Richburg-Hayes’ current IES grant focuses on mixed methods evaluation of a student success program designed for males of color. Dr. Richburg-Hayes is a board member and the current president for the Society for Research in Educational Effectiveness (SREE) and the founding board member of SREE’s Researchers of Color interest group.