Five Outstanding Scholars Join SESP Faculty
The School of Education and Social Policy is pleased to welcome five new professors, each an outstanding scholar in the field. All have won multiple awards, published widely in journals and given numerous major presentations.
Mesmin Destin, who earned his bachelor's degree at Northwestern University, joins the faculty of the Human Development and Social Policy program after receiving his PhD from the University of Michigan in social psychology. He has won awards for his psychological study of the relationship between finances and educational motivation for children. His dissertation was entitled Psychological Pathways from Financial Conditions to Outcomes for Youth.
During spring quarter he was a visiting scholar at Northwestern. Additional awards and honors include a National Science Foundation predoctoral research fellowship and the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies Competitive Predoctoral Fellowship.
Matt Easterday earned his PhD in human-computer interaction from Carnegie-Mellon University, where also earned his master's and bachelor's degrees. At Carnegie-Mellon he started an educational game design course, developed educational technology and won fellowships for his educational research. His Policy World software is a cognitive tutor embedded in an educational game for learning about policy deliberation. He joins the Learning Sciences program as an assistant professor.
His awards include the Siebel Fellowship for recognizing the most talented students at the world's leading graduate schools of business, computer science, and bioengineering and the Program in Interdisciplinary Educational Research Fellowship. Easterday served as a software engineer at the Laboratory for Symbolic and Educational Computing as well as a community development specialist for the Peace Corps in Mongolia.
Jonathan Guryan is an economist who studies education, including educational policy interventions. He joins the Human Development and Social Policy program as an associate professor after 10 years on the faculty at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. He received his PhD in economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his bachelor's in economics from Princeton University.
He has received major grants from the W.T. Grant Foundation for evaluating a summer reading intervention and the National Science Foundation for a study of the effect of Internet subsidies on schools. Guryan is a research consultant for the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, a faculty affiliate at the University of Chicago Crime Lab, associate editor of Labour Economics and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Kirabo Jackson, who received doctoral and master's degrees in economics from Harvard University and a BA from Yale University, studies the economics of education. He comes to Northwestern from Cornell University, where he was an assistant professor of labor economics.
Jackson has received numerous awards, including a Spencer Foundation Research Grant, the Education Reform Dissertation Fellowship, and awards for both graduate and undergraduate instruction. He is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His primary fields for research and teaching are the economics of education and labor economics, and his secondary fields are public finance, applied econometrics and development.
Diane Schanzenbach comes to the Human Development and Social Policy program from the University of Chicago's Harris School of Policy Studies, where she has been on the faculty for six years. She received her PhD and MA in economics from Princeton University and her bachelor's degree from Wellesley College. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Schanzenbach, who researches education policy, has completed studies recently on the impact of school lunch programs, food stamp programs, children's health insurance, class size, child obesity and peer effects, among other topics. She has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, Peggy Howard Fellowship and National Science Foundation Traineeship in the Economics of Education. She was a Scholar in Health Policy Research through the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation at the University of California-Berkeley.
By Marilyn Sherman
Last Modified: 8/12/10
