John B. Diamond is Ford Foundation Professor of Sociology and Education Policy at Brown University. Before coming to Brown, he was the Kellner Family Distinguished Chair in Urban Education and Professor of Education at Wisconsin – Madison. A sociologist of race and education, he studies the relationship between social inequality and educational opportunity, examining how educational leadership, policies, and practices operate through school organizations to shape students' educational opportunities and outcomes. Diamond has published widely in sociology and education journals and is the co-author of Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools (with Amanda Lewis) and Distributed Leadership in Practice (co-edited with James Spillane). Diamond is currently writing a new book, Defending the Color Line, on race and education. 

His current research focuses on race, leadership, and organizational change in urban and suburban schools. He recently received a major grant from the Wallace Foundation to study the development and implementation of equity-centered principal pipelines in several school districts across the United States with colleagues from UW-Madison and other institutions.  

An engaged scholar, Diamond is an Advisory Board Member of the American Sociological Association's Sociology Action Network and a National Planning Team Member of the Urban Research Action Network (URBAN). He is the co-editor of Sociology of Education (with Odis Johnson Jr).

Jing Liu is an Assistant Professor in Education Policy at the University of Maryland College Park. Named as a National Academy of Education Sciences/Spencer Dissertation Fellow, he earned my Ph.D. in Economics of Education from Stanford University in 2018. Before joing UMD, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown University’s Annenberg Institute. Jing's research uses rigorous quantitative evidence to evaluate and inform education policies at the national, state, and local levels, with the goal of improving learning opportunities for historically marginalized students in urban areas. His work broadly engages with critical policy issues including student absenteeism, exclusionary discipline, educator’s labor market, school reform, and higher education. Grounded in economic theory and policy analysis, he uses both quasi-experimental designs and data science methods such as computational linguistic analysis to analyze large administrative data and unstructured information. Most of his current projects focus on understanding the development of student engagement, behavior, and social emotional skills, how these skills and dispositions contribute to student success in the short and long run, and what the implications are for improving equal educational opportunities.

Dr. Jin Li is Professor of Education and Human Development at Brown University. Originally from China, she received her B.A. in German from Guangzhou Institute of Foreign Languages in 1982. She earned her first Ed.M. in education from the University of Pittsburgh in 1988, her second Ed.M. in Administrative Planning and Social Policy in 1991, and her doctoral degree in human development and psychology from Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1997. Dr. Li’s research focuses on East Asian virtue-oriented and Western mind-oriented learning models and how these models shape children’s learning beliefs and achievement. She has studied children and families from Chinese, Taiwanese, Chinese American, European American, and other cultural and ethnic backgrounds. The age groups range from early childhood, middle-childhood and adolescence to college students. Her research has been published in leading professional journals. She has delivered talks in a dozen different countries. Her 2012 book Cultural Foundations of Learning: East and West synthesizes related research over the past decades and offers new perspectives on the indispensable role of culture in human learning. Dr. Li was one of the six inaugural Fellows selected by the Berggruen Philosophy and Culture Center 2015-16 and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University and at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University, China, 2016-17. She was a Guest Lecturer at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University, China 2016-2018.

Jiayue is a graduate student in the Department of Economics at Brown University. Her research interests are development and environmental economics, with a focus on finance and firms. Most of her work involves field experiments and primary data collection in Ghana and Kenya. 

She is affiliated with the Population Studies and Training Center and Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences (S4) at Brown University. Prior to graduate school, Jiayue was a Manager at Hong Kong Monetary Authority.

Jessica Wagner is a Researcher at Mathematica and a former Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. She is an applied microeconomist working in the fields of public and labor economics, with a focus on the economics of education. Her research examines factors that influence human capital formation and equitable access to education, including criminal justice policies, schooling options, and education delivery practices. Jessica holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Toronto. Prior to her graduate studies, she was a Senior Research Specialist in the Industrial Relations Section at Princeton University. 

Dr. Morin joined the Department of Chemistry in Fall 2019 after serving as the department head of the Biotechnology trade program at Norwich Technical High School in Norwich, CT for 5 years. Before this, she was a USDA NIFA postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Prof. Jo Handelsman in the Department of Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology at Yale University. Her research focused on the mechanism of synergy of the Bacillus thuringinesis Cry1a toxin and zwittermicin A in the insecticidal activity towards the tobacco hornworm along with structure elucidation of bacterial natural products. Prior to this, she completed her PhD in Chemistry with Prof. Jason Sello at Brown, where she developed syntheses of small molecule regulators of antibiotic biosynthesis in Actinomycetes. Jesse earned her B.A. in Chemistry at Clark University in Worcester, MA. 

In addition to making Chemistry accessible to all and writing problems featuring interesting enzyme mechanisms, Jesse also has a passion for implementing and evaluating new laboratory curricula with the ultimate goal of more inclusive and effective laboratory pedagogy.

I am an Assistant Professor of Economics at Brown University and an affiliate of the Annenberg Institute. Prior to joining the economics department at Brown, I spent a year as a post-doctoral fellow in the Industrial Relations Section at Princeton University. In 2019, I received my Ph.D. from Boston University. Prior to my life as an economist, I spent four years on active duty in the United States Army and one year as a Mathematics Educator in the Springfield, MA, public school system.

Jennifer is the Stanley J. Bernstein Assistant Professor of Sociology at Brown University and a faculty affiliate at Brown's Population Studies and Training Center, Spatial Structures for the Social Sciences, and Urban Studies Program. In 2019-20, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. 

Her broad research and teaching interests are in stratification, urban sociology, race/ethnicity, and sociology of education. Her work is guided more generally by understanding connections between people and places, with a broad research agenda that investigates dynamics of neighborhood and urban change and inequality, as well as how social and spatial contexts, like neighborhoods and schools, shape opportunities and produce racial/ethnic, health, and economic inequality. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Spencer Foundation, National Academy of Education, and Russell Sage Foundation, among others.

Jazmin Isaacs is a Project Director on the Rhode Island Education Research Initiatives team, where she supports analytical projects focused on course-taking, teacher workforce trends, grade retention, and absenteeism. Her work is guided by a focus on equity and creating actionable evidence for practitioners. 

Before joining the team, she worked as an instructional designer at Harvard Business School and as a research analyst at NWEA. Jazmin holds a Bachelor's degree in Economics from Stanford University and a Master's degree in Education from the University of Oxford.