| Dr. Caroline Ebanks serves as the Vice Dean for Research. In this position, she provides leadership to foster interdisciplinary collaboration across the College, helps secure federal funding for research, supports research excellence in all sub-disciplines, and develops innovative strategies for supporting student research engagement. Caroline is deeply committed to enhancing early childhood education, driven by a profound belief in the importance of high-quality care and education for children and families. With over two decades of dedication to this area of research, Caroline has established herself as an early childhood expert and thought leader, focusing on research projects, policy, and practice. Her expertise includes research methods, grantmaking, and grant monitoring. Caroline fosters relationships and collaboration across diverse groups by emphasizing inclusivity, kindness, and compassion in professional interactions. She is committed to advancing research that benefits children, families, educators, and communities. |
Caroline has served as the Early Childhood Team Lead at the National Center for Education Research (NCER) within the Institute of Education Sciences, as well as the Program Officer for NCER's research grant programs on Early Learning Programs and Policies and the Early Learning Research Network. Her previous roles include Program Officer for the Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research program and the National Center for Research on Early Childhood Education. She has extensive experience in federal research initiatives aimed at improving early learning and development. Caroline earned a BA in Psychology from Wellesley College and a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Cornell University. Caroline is guided by her values and her vision for a society that prioritizes the well-being and education of its youngest members. |
Harriet Jackson, M.Phil., is the Assistant Director of Research. She manages 7 prestigious internal award programs, 5 faculty awards and 2 student awards. The faculty awards include the Collaboration Grants (Levels I and II); the Faculty Executive Committee's Diversity Awards for Research and Teaching, and the Bird-Stick-Ball award. The student awards comprise the Dean's Grant for Student Research and the Dissertation Research Grant. In addition, Harriet oversees VDR communications, which includes: managing content creation, editing, and dissemination for the monthly Research@TC newsletters, the Research@TC website (and its redesign-in-development), and six discipline-specific listservs to communicate news about funding opportunities with short deadlines. To support the goals of the Vice Dean for Research, Harriet fosters relationships with internal and external constituents. She successfully implements programming within Teachers College and between Teachers College and Columbia University, such as the Teachers College-Columbia University-Barnard College ("TCUB") and TC Research Networking Event Series and the internal networking events that featured TC faculty research on language and literacy (10/05/23), international projects (4/20/23) and health and wellness (3/28/23). In her previous role at the College (2014 - 2021), she monitored media coverage of TC and directed top media outlets to TC faculty experts. She also wrote grant proposals, attracted funding, and initiated collaborations with Columbia faculty and thought leaders in civil society to support programming on hate and threats to democracy in a transatlantic framework. Harriet completed an MPhil. in history at New York University, was a lecturer at Cooper Union, NYU, and Princeton, presented her research about war, genocide, and resistance at academic conferences, and published her work in scholarly journals. In her previous career as an executive editor at Gale/Cengage and Columbia University, she helped develop the publishing industry’s first digital libraries and, to align content with curricula and state standards, pioneered metadata tagging and mapping technology in the late 1990s. She admires all forms of innovation and seeks opportunities to support the pathbreaking research of TC faculty and students.