A. Brooks Bowden, an assistant professor of education policy at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, received the Early Career Award from the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness.
In her research, Dr. Bowden focuses on strategies to overcome obstacles like hunger, housing insecurity, and mental health problems that prevent children from getting the most out of school. She studies the economic benefits of those strategies and how to integrate evaluations of their costs and payoffs into randomized control trials.
A nomination for the award for Dr. Bowden summarized her achievements by describing her as “an accomplished academic whose contributions to developing and applying methods of cost analysis in education research and causal program evaluation are hard to overstate.” The nomination also noted her reputation as a thoughtful scholar and mentor whose “focus on student development has already ensured her impact on the next generation of scholars.”
In 2021, Dr. Bowden became the director of the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education, a leading policy and research center at the University of Pennsylvania focused on the costs and benefits of education interventions. She is also an editor of the journal Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis.
Dr. Bowden earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology at Auburn University in Alabama. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in educational policy from the University of Pennsylvania.