Diane Schanzenbach

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach is an economist who studies policies aimed at improving the lives of children in poverty, including education, health, and income support policies. Her recent work has focused on tracing the impact of major public policies such as the Food Stamp Program and early childhood education on children’s long-term outcomes. She is Margaret Walker Alexander Professor of Education and Social Policy and the Director of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University.

Her research has received financial support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Department of Education, the Spencer Foundation and the Smith-Richardson Foundation, and has been published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, and the Journal of Human Resources, among other outlets. She has testified before both the Senate and House of Representatives on her research.

From 2015–17, Schanzenbach served as director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a research associate at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Education.