Postdoctoral Fellowship
The Equity in Early Education Postdoctoral (E3) Fellowship Program trains the next generation of scholars to conduct research toward equitable, impactful, and sustainable early childhood care and education systems.
Application open: October 2024 (for the 25/26 academic year)
Start date: Flexible, summer-fall 2025
Duration: 2 years
Eligibility: U.S. citizen or permanent resident; Must have doctoral degree prior to start date
Why the E3 fellowship program?
To reduce racial and economic inequalities in early childhood, the next generation of scholars will need to collaborate with communities and educational partners to co-produce a base of interdisciplinary scientific evidence.
This program is funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES), grant number R305B220018, and housed at the Stanford Center on Early Childhood. The program is designed to train fellows to conduct work that is
- equity-focused—centering systemic equity as an outcome
- interdisciplinary—examining individual development in the context of structural racial and economic inequality using a variety of theoretical and empirical approaches
- responsive—centering the needs of children, families, the early childhood workforce, and other community stakeholders to co-develop new and effective practices, programs, and policies
What does the program consist of?
The program will provide two years of support to four fellows. Fellows will train and work with four core faculty mentors at Stanford Graduate School of Education and have opportunities to collaborate with two faculty affiliates at the Stanford School of Medicine.
Our postdoctoral fellows will work on active faculty projects examining
- the effects of disparities in structural early childhood care and education (ECCE) opportunities
- heterogeneous effects of ECCE practices, programs, and policies
- the importance of children’s and caregivers’ experiences, contexts, and identities
- conceptualization and assessment of developmental outcomes.
All projects are embedded in established education research-practice partnerships and collaborations with community organizations. These partnerships provide fellows with opportunities to learn to collaborate with practitioners and policymakers to identify urgent questions of practical relevance and to design studies to test pragmatic solutions, analyze data, and disseminate findings and implications.
The program will also provide fellows with training in presenting and publishing their empirical research, communicating their work to policymakers and non-academic audiences, grant-writing, and effective strategies for navigating the job market. Fellows will attend seminars and speaker series and will be able to audit courses offered by the GSE to
- strengthen or expand their analytic skills (via courses offered by the Center for Education Policy Analysis and the Education Data Science program)
- develop cultural competencies (via events organized by the Race, Inequality, and Language in Education program and the initiative on Learning Differences and the Future of Special Education)
- gain partnership experiences with practitioners and policymakers (via courses for the Certificate Program in Partnership Research and engagement with other relevant research centers)
Core faculty
Jelena Obradović, Program Director
Graduate School of Education
Philip Fisher
Graduate School of Education
Francis Pearman
Graduate School of Education
sean reardon
Graduate School of Education
Affiliated faculty
Lisa Chamberlain
School of Medicine
Ryan Padrez
School of Medicine
Who should apply?
The goal of the E3 program is to address issues of equity in applied early childhood settings by promoting skills and experiences adjacent and complementary to those that fellows received during their doctoral training.
This program is for you if you have substantive experience working with research-practice partnerships in community settings or developing curricula or interventions but lack rigorous quantitative evaluation methods training. Or if you have demonstrated disciplinary knowledge and a strong background in applied statistics, but lack experience addressing policy-relevant questions, analyzing large datasets, or working in applied settings.
Applicants from non-traditional backgrounds including, but not limited to, first generation students, veterans, and BIPOC students, are especially encouraged to apply.
Required qualifications:
- an interest in expanding research skills and experience to address issues of equity in applied early childhood settings
- a PhD or EdD in education, developmental psychology, economics, sociology, or a related field within two years of the date of application
- a track record of successfully completing several quantitative methods or mixed method graduate courses
- a dissertation or published manuscript that relies on a quantitative or mixed-method approach with a broad focus on equity-related issues in education or early childhood development/education processes
Eligibility criteria and restrictions:
- Because this is a federally-sponsored training program, applicants must be citizens or permanent residents of the United States
- New postdocs must be in residence in the Bay Area at the beginning of their appointment per university policy
- Doctoral degree must be fully conferred prior to fellowship start date
Applications for the 2024-2025 academic year are now closed. Applications for 2025-2026 will open in October of 2024.