Chair, Board of Directors
Stephanie Simmons Zuilkowski is an Assistant Professor in the College of Education and Learning Systems Institute at Florida State University.
Zuilkowski’s research has the goal of informing programs and policies that will assist children living in sub-Saharan Africa to live healthy lives and reach their educational goals. Her current research focuses on two areas—early grade reading and school participation and dropout in low-resource settings. She has studied adolescent school dropout in Kenya and Indonesia, and is currently completing a study of dropout among adolescent mothers in Zambia. Additionally, Zuilkowski has field experience in child assessment, interviewing, and measures design in Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, South Africa, Nigeria, and Tanzania, including capacity development and training of local assessors. She uses mixed-methods approaches, combining advanced statistical techniques with qualitative interviews and focus groups.
Her work on educational participation and health has been published in Comparative Education Review, the International Journal of Educational Development, and the British Journal of Educational Psychology, among others. She is the recipient of the 2016 Joyce Cain Award from the Comparative and International Education Society. Zuilkowski has previously worked as a research consultant for UNICEF, World Education, the World Bank, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and RTI International on projects related to child health and education. Zuilkowski earned her masters and doctoral degrees from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and her B.A. from Wellesley College.