The William T. Grant Foundation welcomes Lawrence Palinkas and Mary Pattillo to our Scholars Selection Committee. We are enthusiastic about the expertise and insight they bring to this group. The Scholars Selection Committee consists of senior academics representing diverse disciplines and backgrounds. Their responsibilities include application reviews, interviewing finalists, and, ultimately, selecting each class of Scholars.

Dr. Palinkas is the Albert G. and Frances Lomas Feldman Professor of Social Policy and Health at the School of Social Work at the University of Southern California, where he has served since 2005. He holds secondary appointments as a professor in the departments of anthropology and preventive medicine at USC and medicine and family preventive medicine at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Palinkas is a medical anthropologist, specializing in preventive and cross-cultural medicine and health services research. His award-winning work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the National Institutes of Health, the MacArthur Foundation, and the William T. Grant Foundation. Dr. Palinkas is an elected fellow of the American Anthropological Association and Society for Applied Anthropology and the author of more than 260 publications. He earned his doctorate in anthropology from the University of California, San Diego.

Dr. Pattillo is the Harold Washington Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University. Her interests include school and housing choice policies and race and ethnicity as they relate to class stratification, urban sociology, and qualitative methods. Currently, she is part of an interdisciplinary team that is conducting a four-city study of the effects of housing on children’s development. She received the Oliver Cromwell Cox Best Book Award for Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class. Her most recent book, Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City, explores gentrification and the transformation of public housing in an African American neighborhood. She is co-editor of Imprisoning America: The Social Effects of Mass Incarceration and has authored numerous journal articles. She is a founding board member of Urban Prep Charter Academies, Inc., a network of all-boys high schools in Chicago. Dr. Pattillo earned her doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago.

“These are forward-thinking, innovative scholars, dedicated to supporting the next generation of young researchers to do important work to benefit youth,” says Vivian Tseng, Ph.D., senior program officer at the William T. Grant Foundation. “We look forward to the interdisciplinary and mixed methods expertise that they will bring to the Scholars Program.”

As we welcome our new members, we also thank Michael Wald, the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law at Stanford University, for his 10 years of exceptional service on the Committee—four as chair. Cynthia Garcia-Coll, a dedicated member of the Committee since 2004, will become the next chair. Dr. Garcia-Coll is the Charles Pitts Robinson and John Palmer Barstow Professor of Education, Psychology, and Pediatrics at Brown University.