Dolores Acevedo-Garcia

Director, Professor of Human Development and Social Policy

Dolores Acevedo-Garcia is Samuel F. and Rose B. Gingold Professor of Human Development and Social Policy, and Director of the Institute for Child, Youth and Family Policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University.

She is Project Director for diversitydatakids.org, a comprehensive research program on child wellbeing, opportunity, and equity funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Her research focuses on the social determinants of racial/ethnic inequities in health (e.g. residential segregation, neighborhood inequality, immigrant adaptation); the role of social policies in reducing those inequities (e.g. housing policies, immigrant policies); and the health and wellbeing of children with special needs and their families.

In 2017-19, she was a member of the congressionally-mandated National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine Committee on Building an Agenda to Reduce the Number of Children in Poverty by Half in 10 Years. The Committee's report "A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty" was released in February 2019.

In 2020-2021, she was a member of the NASEM Executive Committee for the Response and Resilient Recovery Strategic Science Initiative developed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic to inform crisis response and recovery across U.S. society.

She is a member of the NASEM’s Societal Experts Action Network (SEAN) Executive Committee and a member of the Steering Committee on the Housing and Children’s Healthy Development Study funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the MacArthur Foundation. She was a member of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on How Housing Matters for Families and Children (2009-2014).

Acevedo-Garcia holds a doctorate in public affairs with a concentration in demography and a master’s in public affairs and urban and regional planning from Princeton University. She also holds a bachelor’s degree in public administration from El Colegio de Mexico, Mexico.

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