| 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 Assistant Director of Research. She supports the goals of the Office of the Vice Dean for Research by fostering relationships with internal and external constituents that can facilitate the submission of multidisciplinary collaborative grants to federal agencies and foundations. She finds funding opportunities for faculty and successfully implements programming between Teachers College and Columbia University, such as the famed Teachers College-Columbia University-Barnard College networking series. She curated VDR's internal networking events that featured TC faculty research. Harriet manages prestigious internal award programs for faculty and students. She supervises VDR communications, which includes managing content creation; editing and disseminating the monthly Research@TC newsletters, updating the redesigned Research@TC website, and deploying discipline-specific listservs to communicate timely news about funding opportunities.
In her previous role, Harriet worked in the former "Development and External Affairs" Department at Teachers College (2014 - 2021), where she monitored media coverage of TC faculty and directed journalists 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. Her "Transatlantic Summer Forum on Racism and Antisemitism for World History Teachers," funded by Columbia's Alliance Program, is one such example.
Harriet completed an MPhil. in history at New York University, was a lecturer at Cooper Union, NYU, and Princeton, and a historian and archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, where she researched Jews in France during the Holocaust. She presented her historical 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. She admires all forms of innovation and seeks opportunities to support the pathbreaking research of TC faculty and students.