Vandell elected to National Academy of Education

Deborah Lowe Vandell, dean of UC Irvine’s School of Education, was recently elected to the National Academy of Education, an organization dedicated to advancing high-quality education research and its use in policy formulation and practice. Founded in 1965, the academy consists of U.S. members and foreign associates who are elected on the basis of outstanding scholarship related to education. Named founding dean of the School of Education in 2012, Vandell is an internationally recognized scholar on the effects of early child care, K-12 education, after-school programs and families on children’s social, behavioral and academic functioning. She was a principal investigator with the National Institute of Child Health & Human Development Study of Early Child Care & Youth Development. As part of that study, she conducted an intensive evaluation of 1,300 children from birth through high school. The author of more than 150 articles and three books, Vandell is a member of the governing council of the Society for Research in Child Development and a fellow of the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science. She started her career as an elementary school teacher while earning a master’s degree in education at Harvard University. Vandell later received a Ph.D. in psychology from Boston University. Before arriving at UC Irvine, she was the Sears-Bascom Professor of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Vandell joins three other UCI faculty (Greg Duncan, Jacquelynne Eccles and Ruben Rumbaut) who are members of the National Academy of Education.