The William T. Grant Foundation is pleased to announce the selection of our fifth group of Distinguished Fellows. The Foundation created the Distinguished Fellows program to create connections between research, policy, and practice. Now in its sixth year, the program has proven successful in helping researchers understand what kind of research evidence is needed by and useful to policymakers and practitioners, as well as giving policymakers and practitioners a unique opportunity to immerse themselves in a research setting and gain an understanding of what constitutes high-quality research. The Fellowship is designed for those who are in mid-career and influential in their roles, as we hope that the Fellows will use their experiences to return to their primary roles and work to increase the supply of, demand for, and use of high-quality research in the service of improved youth outcomes.

“This program has become an integral part of our work to improve the relevance of research, particularly for practitioners. The researchers who have completed their Fellowships are doing work that reflects a more accurate understanding of the needs of practitioners, and while there are fewer graduates from policy and practice roles, they tell us they are much more able to commission and recognize good empirical work,” said Robert Granger, president of the Foundation.

Applications for the Sixth Annual Distinguished Fellows Competition are currently being accepted; the submission deadline is January 6, 2010. Please see our Distinguished Fellows Application Guide online for more information.

Descriptions of the three new William T. Grant Distinguished Fellows and their projects follow.

Using Data to Build the Capacity of After-School and Youth Development Providers
Elizabeth Devaney, M.A.
Providence After School Alliance
$162,878
2009–2011

Host Organization: Weikert Center for Youth Program Quality; Brown University Department of Education

Elizabeth Devaney is deputy director at the Providence After School Alliance (PASA). Over her four years at PASA, she has remained committed to incorporating high-quality data into youth program improvement efforts, and proposes a Fellowship experience that will deepen her familiarity with organizational quality improvement research design, methods, and measures. Devaney will spend three weeks of each year working in Michigan at the Weikert Center with Dr. Charles Smith, developer of the Youth Program Quality Assessment, or in Washington, D.C. with the Center’s research director. Both will assist her in developing and implementing a research project on how individual staff use data to improve practice, and how leaders in participating youth organizations in Rhode Island are or are not creating a culture of data-driven accountability and improvement. Additionally, Devaney will spend one day per week working with Dr. Kenneth Wong at Brown University, who will mentor her on research methods and assist her in the design and conceptualization of her project.

Integrating Child Welfare, Income Support, and Child Support to Improve Outcomes
Maria Cancian, Ph.D.
University of Wisconsin, Madison
$190,966
2009–2011

Host Organization: Wisconsin Department of Children and Families (DCF)

Maria Cancian is a professor of public affairs and social work at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She has an accomplished record as an economics researcher and has produced over 40 peer-reviewed articles and chapters dealing with poverty, welfare, and child support. Her main academic interest is learning about how the child welfare system interacts with the broader child support and welfare systems. She will use her Distinguished Fellows award to spend one summer and the following semester working full-time in the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families (DCF). She will work with policymakers in the central DCF offices on a range of activities, including quality service reviews and child death reviews. She will shadow her mentors to gain a deeper appreciation of the day-to-day challenges of reorganizing a state welfare/child welfare bureaucracy, and spend an extended period of time shadowing child welfare caseworkers in two county offices to observe the intersection of policy and practice. Dr. Cancian will also work in the Department’s Office of Prevention Initiatives to learn more about efforts to foster cross-department coordination.

Improving Research, Policy, and Practice in Family Courts through Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Peter Salem, M.A. 
Association of Family and Conciliation Courts
$186,417
2009–2011

Host Organization: Arizona State University Prevention Research Center

Peter Salem is the executive director of the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts (AFCC), based in Madison, Wisconsin. Salem is well-known in the family court and mediation community and received the Distinguished Mediator Award from the Association for Conflict Resolution in 2008. AFCC is an interdisciplinary association that in part provides training and education on research and best practices to judges, lawyers, mediators and mental health professionals. Salem will use his Distinguished Fellows award to become a more effective consumer of research in order to systematically integrate social science research into the family law community and facilitate partnerships between researchers, practitioners and policymakers. He will work with Irwin Sandler, Sharlene Wolchik and David MacKinnon at the Arizona State University Prevention Research Center, which specializes in research on children of divorce. Salem will strengthen his understanding of research methods and processes by immersing himself in an experimental evaluation of a court-based intervention for high-conflict families, as well as participating in some smaller scale research undertakings. He will spend one week each month participating in research activities at ASU. Additionally, Salem will undertake two directed readings courses (with MacKinnon and Sandler) on research methods and design, and prevention science, respectively.