About the Mind in the Making Staff

Three incredible individuals joined Families and Work Institute team on June 1^st to work with us on Mind in the Making: Marijata Daniel-Echols as the Senior Program Director, Julie Riess as Senior Advisor on Education and Child Development and Jennie Portnof as Project Coordinator.

Marijata has been the Director of Research at the High Scope Educational Research Foundation and has wonderful in-depth experience and expertise in managing multi-site projects, in conducting research as well as in working directly with policy makers, teachers, and families to improve the quality of education and care. She will be working full-time but will work remotely from her home in Michigan. 

Julie is at Vassar College where she is the director of their early childhood laboratory schools and serves as a professor of education and development psychology. In fact, she has been using Mind in the Making as the basis of her spring semester course. Julie also writes a regular Gannett column for parents and has extensive experience in teacher and parent education and curriculum development. She will work with us full-time over the summer and then as an advisor when the fall semester begins.

You can see why with Marijata, Julie and Jennie we have an ideal team for this next phase of our work on Mind in the Making. They combine strong backgrounds in child development, in research, and in working with all of the players in communities to help children and families thrive. They are visionary, creative and practical and will work on our direct work with the growing number of communities with which we are working as well as in creating new materials and training. We feel incredibly lucky to set off on the next phase of our Mind in the Making journey with their leadership.

From Marijata:

I was raised by socially conscious, activist parents. Watching them champion the causes of young children and the educational achievement gap suffered by many African-American students seeking to gain admittance to and successfully graduate from college instilled in me the knowledge that whatever I did for a living, it would be something that had real world implications for families and communities, especially those that are poor and disadvantaged.  The intersections of race, class, and opportunity that are my interest have always required an interdisciplinary approach—sociology, education, psychology, economics, and political science to name a few. 

As I progressed as a student, it became ever more clear to me that I did not want to pursue a traditional academic career. I found a home within the realm of public policy and applied research. The professional passion modeled by my parents manifests itself in me as a desire to find ways to help organizations that serve disadvantaged populations fully implement quality programs using evidence-based interventions and prevention programs. Over the past ten years, I have done that by providing information, consultation, and program evaluation services to human service agencies, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies that helps them improve their early childhood education programs, practices, and policymaking. 

It is this commitment to addressing social and economic inequality that I will continue to eagerly pursue as I join the team at the Families and Work Institute, whose mission and work represent a model of how applied research can be used to support substantive change in the world.

Marijata C. Daniel-Echols, Ph.D. most recently was the Director of Research at the HighScope Educational Research Foundation.  She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Michigan as well as a Masters in Public Policy from the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and an M.A. in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles. In addition to program evaluation, Daniel-Echols has been involved extensively in the development of tools designed to measure child outcomes and early childhood program quality.  She has served as Principal Investigator for projects at the local, state, and national level addressing a range of topics including teacher professional development, early language and literacy, early math, special education, family, friend, and neighbor care, Head Start, and state-funded preschool.  In addition to early childhood education, Daniel- Echols' knowledge base includes organizational theory, policy creation and implementation, and program evaluation applied to the areas of welfare reform, employment policy, and political participation. 

From Julie:

Even as a child, I loved teaching children. It started out simple. I would find myself helping a 5^th grade classmate with a math problem, or gravitating to read to the younger children in the school library. By high school, I spent every lunch period next door at the elementary school; by college, I was completely at home in the campus laboratory school. (I would return a decade later to become the director of that same school.) Graduate school created a platform to merge the depth of critical thinking with the creativity of problem-solving. Each experience helped me to better articulate and understand what I felt watching a child’s face come alive with the excitement of learning. 

During my past seventeen years as director of Vassar’s early childhood laboratory schools and as a professor of education and developmental psychology, I have enjoyed a career which blended my interests into one position: I have developed curricula and implemented teacher training, parent support and research programs that reflected contemporary child development theory and research. In concert with teaching, writing has been a forum for me to consider real-life applications of the developmental psychology literature to the daily tasks of parenting. Over the past eleven years, I have been writing a bi-weekly column, The Early Years, distributed nation-wide through Gannett Publications. 

Now, a new adventure awaits me as I join the Mind in the Making team with Ellen, Marijata, and Jennie. Regardless of the contexts, the challenge and exhilaration of helping parents and teachers, community organizations and schools learn about the wonders of child development are the same. It is what keeps the fire in my eyes. 

Julie A. Riess, Ph.D. is a developmental psychologist, early childhood educator, author and mother. For the past seventeen years, she has been the director of Vassar College’s early childhood laboratory schools.  As a faculty member she has taught courses on the applications of developmental psychology research in understanding children in the context of their lives at home and school. Riess is the author of more than 200 articles on parenting, which appear in her bi-weekly column, The Early Years through Gannett Publications’ nation-wide distribution. As an educator and developmental psychologist, Riess has conducted regional and national training workshops for early childhood educators, parents, administrators, researchers and health care professionals on matching teaching, parenting and health care practices to contemporary research in child development.