Dr. Souto-Manning is a leading researcher in the field of early childhood education and development. She is the president of the Erickson Institute. As a member of Columbia Teachers College’s faculty, Souto-Manning served as director of numerous College academic programs, including Early Childhood Education, Early Childhood Special Education, and the doctoral program in Curriculum & Teaching. Throughout her scholarship, teaching and engagement, Souto-Manning’s award-winning work is focused on justice, equity, inclusion and belonging in early childhood teaching and teacher education.

Dr. Doucet is the Executive Director of the NYU Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools and an Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education and Urban Education in the department of Teaching and Learning at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. She is also an affiliated faculty member of the NYU Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools, Institute for Human Development and Social Change, and Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.  Doucet has a Ph.D. in Human Development and Family Studies from UNC-Greensboro and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education with fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation.

Dr. Laurie Miller Brotman is the Bezos Family Foundation Professor of Early Childhood Development and professor of population health and psychiatry at the NYU School of Medicine. She is the director of the Center for Early Childhood Health and Development in the Department of Population Health at NYU Langone Medical Center and the developer of ParentCorps. ParentCorps transforms the pre-K experience in historically divested neighborhoods by supporting schools to partner with families. ParentCorps is committed to engaging in courageous conversations about race and interrogating white supremacy.

​Leading an international movement to connect biology and cognitive science to education, the late Dr. Fischer was founding president of the International Mind, Brain, and Education Society and founding editor of the new journal Mind, Brain, and Education. He had a prolific career studying cognitive and emotional development and learning from birth through adulthood, combining analysis of the commonalities across people with the diversity of pathways of learning and development. His work focused on the organization of behavior and the ways it changes, especially with development, learning, emotion, and culture. In Dynamic Skill Theory, he provided a single framework to analyze how organismic and environmental factors contribute to the rich variety of developmental change and learning across and within people. His research included students’ learning and problem solving, brain development, concepts of self in relationships, cultural contributions to social-cognitive development, early reading skills, emotions, child abuse, and brain development.