Workshop on Early Education

Marc H. Bornstein holds a B.A. from Columbia College, M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University, honorary doctorates from the University of Padua and University of Trento, and an Honorary Professorship at the University of Heidelberg. Bornstein is President Emeritus of the Society for Research in Child Development, and he has held faculty positions at Princeton University and New York University as well as visiting academic appointments in Bamenda (Cameroon), Bristol, London, Munich, New York, Oxford, Paris, Santiago (Chile), Seoul, Tokyo, and Trento. Bornstein is Editor Emeritus of Child Development and founding Editor of Parenting: Science and Practice. He has administered numerous Federal and Foundation grants, sits on the editorial boards of several professional journals, is a member of scholarly societies in a variety of disciplines, and consults for governments, foundations, universities, publishers, the media, and UNICEF. Bornstein has published widely in experimental, methodological, comparative, developmental, and cultural science as well as neuroscience, pediatrics, and aesthetics.

Sally Grantham-McGregor trained in medicine at St. Mary’s Hospital Paddington and worked at the Tropical Metabolism Research Unit at the University of the West Indies from 1974 until joining CIHD in 1995. She is the chair of the Steering Committee for the Lancet series on Child Development in Developing Countries which have recently been published. She has published over 150 peer reviewed articles and written many book chapters. She is an adviser to the British Government and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. She is a Member of Task Force on Iron for the UK Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition; the Advisory Board for Early Childhood Program for Open Society Foundation, and a member of the Advisory Panel on Early Childhood and Readiness to Learn for the Inter-American Development Bank, Washington. She has recently been responsible for a chapter on Cognitive, Motor and Behavioral Development in Children.

Sule Alan is a Professor of Economics at the European University Institute, Florence and an Adjunct Professor of Economics at Bilkent University, Turkey. 

She is a board member of the Innovation in Government Initiative and co-chair of the Humanitarian Protection Initiative at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a research fellow at CEPR, an affiliate at the Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), CESifo and Character Lab. 

Her research interests include education, migrant integration, gender and household behavior. She is a co-editor of the Economic Journal (2021-present).

Margherita Fort is full professor at the Department of Economic Sciences at the University of Bologna.

She received her Ph.D. in Applied Statistics in Economic and Social Sciences from the University of Padua and was Marie Curie Fellow (Institute for Social and Economic Research-ISER, Essex) and Max Weber fellow at the European University Institute.

She collaborated with the FBK-IRVAPP research centre and is a research fellow at IZA, CESifo and CEPR.

She has published in international journals such as Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Labor Economics, Economic Journal, Economic Policy.

Her research deals mainly with applied micro-econometrics, specifically assessing the effects of public policies, with applications mainly in the field of the education economics and labour economics. In the recent years, her research is specifically focussing on the evidence-based investments in young children and their families.

Marian Bakermans-Kranenburg is a professor at ISPA Lisbon, and also a visiting scholar and research associate at the Center for Attachment Research, The New School for Social Research, New York, and at Stockholm University, Sweden. In the past 30 years she has done studies on parenting and child development, including studies on the neurobiology of fathering. Together with her colleagues Femmie Juffer and Marinus van IJzendoorn, she developed an intervention to support positive parenting and sensitive discipline (VIPP-SD), with demonstrated (meta-analytic) effectiveness in various groups and countries. She is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and an elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Marinus van IJzendoorn is Honorary Professor at the Research Department of Clinical, Education and Health Psychology, Faculty of Brain Sciences of University College London, UK, and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Psychiatry, Monash University, Melbourne Australia.  He is an Emeritus Professor of Leiden University and Erasmus University Rotterdam, both in the Netherlands. Marinus studies the social, psychological and neurobiological determinants of parenting, child development and psychopathology, with special emphasis on attachment, stress regulation, and child maltreatment. On Google Scholar more than 120.000 citations to his publications have been recorded (H-index = 164. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, recipient of the Spinoza Prize and several international awards. With Marian Bakermans-Kranenburg he recently published 'Matters of Significance. Replication, Translation, and Academic Freedom in Developmental Science' which can be downloaded for free at UCL PRESS (2024) https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/234011 , or via Amazon (for Kindle, 1.34 euro). See his website: www.marinusvanijzendoorn.nl

Matthias Sutter is director at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods and Professor of Experimental Economics at the Universities of Cologne and Innsbruck. He received his PhD and habilitation in economics from the University of Innsbruck, and worked previously as professor at the Max Planck Institute for Economics in Jena, the University of Gothenburg or the European University Institute. His research interests include the economics of team decision making, or the economics of credence goods. Currently, he is mainly examining the economic decision making of children and teenagers. His work has been published in all top-5 journals of economics, but also in journals such as Science, Nature Communications, or PNAS. In 2023, he published a popular science book “Behavioral Economics for Leaders” with Wiley.

Flávio Cunha is a Professor of Economics at Rice University, a Research Associate at the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania, a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Research Associate at Rede de Economia Aplicada. He received his MSc in Economics from Fundação Getúlio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro and his PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago. Cunha’s teaching and research fields are labor economics and economics of education. 

Webpage: Flavio Cunha

Orazio Attanasio is the Cowles Professor of Economics at Yale University and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a Senior Fellow at the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic and Policy Research.

He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, where he has served as President in 2020, a Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2014 he served as President of the European Economic Association. 

After obtaining a PhD at the London School of Economics, Orazio taught at Stanford University and the University of Bologna. He was also a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and visiting professor at the University of Chicago. Before joining Yale, he was the Jeremy Bentham Professor of Economics at University College London. Until recently, he was  a Research Fellow and one of the Directors of the ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and a visiting professor of the Center for Experimental Research on Fairness, Inequality and Rationality (FAIR) at NHH.

He has been Managing Editor of the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of the European Economic Association and Quantitative Economics.

In 2016 he was awarded the Carlos Diaz Alejandro prize by LACEA and the Klaus Jacobs Research Prize by the Jacobs foundation.

He has carried out evaluations of education financing and access programmes, including large conditional cash transfers programs, the impact of scholarships on school enrolment and the effect of subjective expectations on the returns to education.