Ellen Galinsky is the chief science officer and executive director of Mind in the Making at the Bezos Family Foundation. She also serves as President of Families and Work Institute. She’s conducted research on child-care, parent-professional relationship, parental development, work-family issues and youth voice, including studies on how young people view their working parents, violence and their work in the future. She has found that what adults think that young people think and what they think are often quite different.
Ellen is the author of the best-selling Mind in the Making, more than 100 books/reports and 300 articles. Other highlights include serving as a parent expert in the Mister Rogers Talks to Parents TV series, as child care expert of Dr. T. Berry Brazelton’s TV series What Every Baby Knows and being the elected President of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). In 2018. the Work and Family Researchers Network established the ongoing Ellen Galinsky Generative Researcher Award.
Ellen is currently at work on a book about adolescence called The Breakthrough Years. She began this journey by interviewing young people, asking them what they wanted to know about their own development, then interviewed and filmed over 40 researchers and neuroscientists on adolescent development in the U.S. and abroad. She and colleagues have also conducted two studies of a nationally representative group of adolescents, 9 though 18 and their parents, including one that is in the field right now about how they are doing during the pandemic and this period of racial justice unrest. They have also conducted a study of life skills in six states and Ellen spent the summer interviewing some of the adolescents and parents who participated in the survey. It has been an exciting journey!