Susan Nall Bales | Lynn Davey | Tiffany Manuel | Jane Feinberg | Diane Benjamin | Yndia Lorick-Wilmot | Nat Kendall-Taylor | Kate Vaughan | Moira O'Neil | Michael Erard | Eric Lindland |Tia Remington-Bell | Adam F. Simon | Rob Shore | Franklin D. Gilliam Jr. | Linda Bowen | Claudia Strauss | Miranda Yates | Curt McPhail | Anna Mikulak | Suzanne Lo | Beth Fisher | Christine Nolan
Staff
SUSAN NALL BALES is founder and President of the FrameWorks Institute and a Visiting Scientist in the Department of Society, Human Development, and Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. She has lectured at Pitzer College and served as a visiting scholar at Brandeis University’s Heller Graduate School for Social Policy and Management. She is a contributing member of the National Scientific Council at Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child. She is also a Visiting Scholar in Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
A veteran communications strategist and issues campaigner, she has more than 30 years of experience researching, designing and implementing campaigns on social issues. She is the author of numerous articles on public opinion and media published by Sage Publications, the Zero to Three Bulletin, Society for Research on Child Development and the Center for Research on Children. Most recently, she is co-author of the monograph Communications for Social Good, published by the Foundation Center. Her work has been presented at colloquia and lectures at Brandeis, Yale, Rice and Harvard Universities and at the White House.
Before founding FrameWorks in 1999, Ms. Bales served for six years as director of strategic communications and children’s issues at the Benton Foundation, where she founded www.connectforkids.org, an award-winning Web gateway for news and research on children’s issues. Ms. Bales served for four years as Vice President for Communications at the National Association of Children’s Hospitals, where she helped create the popular “Who’s for Kids and Who’s Just Kidding?” public advocacy campaign and founded the Coalition for America’s Children, with more than 350 organizational members. For eight years she served as President of Public Affairs Research & Communications, where she designed and managed communications campaigns nationwide. A graduate of UCLA, she received her M.A. from Middlebury College. She has served on the Adolescence in the 21st Century Study Group of the Society for Research on Adolescence. She serves on the Working Group on Prior Political Movements and Ideological Change, as part of the Ford Foundation’s Building Knowledge for Social Justice Project.
LYNN DAVEY is Vice President of the Institute. Before coming to FrameWorks in 2005, Dr. Davey served as Vice President for Research at the Maine Children's Alliance and directed the Maine KIDS COUNT Project for six years. Davey was also professor of psychology at St. Joseph's College, Maine, where she instituted the college's Department of Psychology. Davey created major programs of study in both Psychology and Human Development and served as chair of the Department for seven years. Davey earned her B.A. from the University of Notre Dame and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from The Catholic University of America. She is a member of the American Psychological Association, the Society for Research on Adolescence and the Society for Research in Child Development.
Dr. Davey can be reached at ldavey@frameworksinstitute.org.
TIFFANY MANUEL is the Research Director of the Institute. Prior to joining Frameworks, Manuel served as a senior policy analyst at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services where she was responsible for conducting and directing public policy research. She has served as a senior researcher at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and has served as an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She has worked as an economic development consultant in the areas of program evaluation, comparative regional economic analysis, cost-benefit analysis, and social welfare and labor policy analysis. Manuel holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Chicago, a master's degree in Political Science from Purdue University, and doctorate and master's degrees in Public Policy from the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Dr. Manuel can be reached at tmanuel@frameworksinstitute.org.
JANE FEINBERG is a Senior Associate with the Institute. As a member of the Field Building team, she produces video and on-line tools, and works with issue advocates to translate FrameWorks’ research into field-based practices that advance public will. An award-winning journalist, Feinberg spent twenty-five years as a writer and producer of public and commercial television programs and series. For PBS, she developed and produced college telecourses and public affairs and children's programs, including an hour-long documentary about Amelia Earhart, a special on Tip O’Neil Jr., and segments for the “MacNeil/Lehrer NEWSHour.” She was a producer for New England's nightly television newsmagazine show, "Chronicle," for nearly a decade. As a public affairs and communications professional, Feinberg has consulted to a variety of non-profits and government agencies, and served as Director of Communications for the Boston Public Schools. She is a graduate of the University of Minnesota and holds a Masters degree in Journalism from Boston University.
Ms. Feinberg can be reached at jfeinberg@frameworksinstitute.org.
DIANE BENJAMIN is a Senior Associate with the Institute. As a member of the Field Building team, she manages the Institute’s FrameCheck process and creates communications tools for advocates and front-line communicators. Prior to joining the Institute, she served as Director of Outreach for the Maternal and Child Health Training Program at the University of Minnesota, where she was responsible for continuing education and outreach, conferences and institutes, technical assistance to MCH professionals in the community, and identifying and coordinating community field experiences for MCH graduate students. Benjamin also served as the Director of Minnesota KIDS COUNT at the Children's Defense Fund of Minnesota for nearly a decade. Her areas of expertise include message framing on issues related to public health and child and family well-being, including the presentation of data. She holds a Masters of Public Health degree in Community Health Education from the University of Minnesota.
Ms. Benjamin can be reached at dbenjamin@frameworksinstitute.org.
YNDIA LORICK-WILMOT is a Senior Associate at the Institute. A trained sociologist in the areas of race, ethnic identity, immigration, and human services, she has served as a consultant for nonprofits, philanthropic foundations, and research centers in Boston and New York. Prior to joining Frameworks, she held a post-doctoral fellowship for the Panamanian Council of New York in collaboration with the Institute for Pan American Affairs. She has served as Senior Lecturer for Northeastern University’s College for Professional Studies, and is the author of numerous academic papers that explore the experiences of marginalized racial-ethnics and immigrants through a lens that emphasizes reducing inequality. Lorick-Wilmot is the author of Creating Black Caribbean Ethnic Identity, part of the series The New Americans: Recent Immigration and American Society (LFB Academic Publishing). She holds a B.A. in Sociology from Trinity College (Connecticut), Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies from the Radcliffe Consortium in Women’s Studies, and M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Northeastern University.
Dr. Lorick-Wilmot can be reached at ylorickwilmot@frameworksinstitute.org.
NAT KENDALL-TAYLOR is a Senior Researcher and Project Director with the Institute. In this role, he employs social science theory and research methods from anthropology to improve the ability of public policy to positively influence health and social issues. This involves studying how cognitive theory can be applied in understanding how people interpret information and make meaning of their social worlds. His past research has focused on child and family health and in understanding the social and cultural factors that create health disparities and affect decision-making. As a medical anthropologist, Nat has conducted fieldwork on the coast of Kenya studying pediatric epilepsy and the impacts of chronic illness on family well-being. He has also applied social science methods in research in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan and has conducted ethnographic research on motivation in “extreme” athletes. Nat has a B.A. from Emory University and Masters and Doctoral degrees from the University of California Los Angeles.
Dr. Kendall-Taylor can be reached at nkendall-taylor@frameworksinstitute.org.
KATE VAUGHAN is a Senior Associate with the Institute. As a member the Field Building team, she trains advocates, community members and communications professionals to apply FrameWorks' research to the work of advancing social issues. Prior to joining the Institute, Vaughan worked at Health Care For All in Massachusetts, the driving force behind Massachusetts' historic health care reform movement. Here she developed and ran the highly successful Massachusetts branch of Watch Your Mouth, a campaign created by FrameWorks to raise public awareness of children's oral health. She also directed the statewide Oral Health Advocacy Taskforce. Before this, Vaughan worked as a legislative aide for Representative Liz Malia, and spent several years working with youth in state custody in New Hampshire. Her areas of expertise are oral health, policy advocacy campaigning and youth issues. She has traveled extensively and holds a Masters degree in Social Work from Boston University.
Ms. Vaughan can be reached at kvaughan@frameworksinstitute.org.
MOIRA O'NEIL is a Senior Researcher with the Institute. In this role, she works with an interdisciplinary team employing a range of methods to further public understanding of social issues. Moira is trained as a sociologist, earning her BA from University of California Santa Cruz and masters and doctoral degrees from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Moira has a broad range of research interests and experiences. Her Master's thesis was an in-depth analysis of racial imagery in popular fitness magazines and her dissertation examined the medicalization of war trauma at the turn of the twentieth century in the United States. Prior to graduate school, worked as a research associates on projects related to immigration policy as well as illicit drug use and drug policy.
Dr. O'Neil can be reached at moneil@frameworksinstitute.org.
MICHAEL ERARD is a Senior Researcher with the Institute, developing robust simplifying models and testing them in the field. Prior to joining FrameWorks, he wrote about language, linguists, and linguistics for the New York Times, Science, Wired, The New Scientist, The Atlantic, The New Republic. In 2008 he received a Dobie Paisano Writing Fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters. He is the author of Um...: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean, a natural history of speech disfluency and speech errors, and a cultural history of fluency. He has been researching language superlearners and the upper limits of the ability to speak and learn languages for Babel No More, culminating in a book to be published by Henry Holt & Co. in 2011. He earned his B.A. from Williams College, and an M.A. in linguistics and Ph.D. in English from the University of Texas at Austin.
Dr. Erard can be reached at merard@frameworksinstitute.org.
ERIC LINDLAND is a Senior Researcher with the Institute. Prior to joining Frameworks, he taught anthropology at Emory University, Loyola University Chicago, and the University of Notre Dame, and before that was a high school teacher and administrator in Guatemala. As a cognitive anthropologist, his research has focused on how analogies are used in language, symbolism, and ethics to bridge meanings between differing cultural systems. In particular, he has engaged cultural modeling theory to explore the intersection of African and Western religious and medical systems. His ethnographic and historical research in Malawi centered on the challenges of therapeutic decision-making in a pluralistic religious and medical culture, and on people’s creative development of new models that combine and correlate magical, spiritual, and biomedical healing techniques. Eric has a B.A. in Political Studies from Gordon College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Emory University.
Dr. Lindland can be reached at elindland@frameworksinstitute.org.
TIA REMINGTON-BELL is a Junior Associate at the Institute. She graduated from Colorado College with a B.A. in cultural anthropology. She has worked as a field manager, canvassing and organizing a grassroots support movement for non-profit organizations, and as a volunteer in the 2008 Presidential Campaign. Her senior thesis examined patterns of culture as expressed in social networking sites among military spouses.
Ms. Remington-Bell can be reached at trembell@frameworksinstitute.org.
ADAM F. SIMON is a Senior Researcher with the Institute. He has taught courses in political communication and American politics at Yale, the University of Washington and UCLA. His latest major work, “Toward a theory relating political discourse, media and public opinion,” won the American Political Science Association / International Communication Association award for Best Article in Political Communication for 2008. His current work, Mass Informed Consent: Upgrading Democracy with Polls and New Media, popularizes polling and public opinion research by introducing social scientific techniques in three empirical studies and relating media to polling results. His first book—The Winning Message: Candidate Behavior, Campaign Discourse and Democracy—broke new ground in investigating candidate behavior in American electoral campaigns. His work has also appeared in the American Political Science Review and the Journal of Communication as well as other scholarly journals. Simon earned his Ph.D. in political science from UCLA.
Dr. Simon can be reached at asimon@frameworksinstitute.org.
ROB SHORE is a Junior Associate with the Institute, specializing in the production of video-based media. Since returning from two years in Mongolia, where he worked as a Peace Corps volunteer, Rob has been making documentary films about American family rites of passage. He is also a published writer and photographer. Rob graduated from Emory University in 2006 with degrees in film and anthropology. His honors thesis examined cinematic myths of the dysfunctional American family.
Mr. Shore can be reached at rshore@frameworksinstitute.org.
Fellows
FRANKLIN D. GILLIAM JR. is a Senior Fellow with the Institute and Dean of the School of Public Affairs at UCLA. He has served since 2002 as UCLA's first-ever associate vice chancellor of community partnerships. In that role, he built a strong program of academic civic engagement through the Center for Community Partnerships. He is the founding director of the Center for Communications and Community at UCLA. At FrameWorks, Dr. Gilliam has served as project director for the Framing Race in America Project and has contributed to projects on health care, early child development, youth, and rural issues.
Dr. Gilliam is the author of Farther to Go: Reading and Cases in African-American Politics (Harcourt Brace), and has published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Social Policy Report, Urban Affairs Review, Journal of Politics, Nieman Reports, Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, Social Science Quarterly, Public Opinion, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Government and Policy, Sociological Inquiry, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Psychology, Ethiopian Review and The Source.
In 2004 Dr. Gilliam was awarded the Mark O. Hatfield National Scholar Award, Portland State University and in 2006 he was presented with the Distinguished Alumni, University of Iowa, 2006. Dr. Gilliam received his B.A. from Drake University and his Ph.D. from University of Iowa.
LINDA BOWEN is a Fellow with the Institute and has been executive
director of the Institute for Community Peace in Washington, D. C. since
its inception in 1995. She has over twenty-five years of experience in
violence prevention, program management and development, policy
analysis, research and community building. Prior to joining ICP, she
served as Special Assistant to the Commissioner of the Administration
on Children, Youth and Families, Department of Health and Human
Services during the Clinton Administration, Assistant Dean at the
School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago
and program director at the Center for Successful Child Development in
Chicago, IL (a precursor of community based, comprehensive parent
engagement and child development programs). Bowen had authored or
co-authored papers and reports on child development, adolescent
pregnancy and parenting and violence prevention.
CLAUDIA STRAUSS is a Fellow with the Institute and Professor of Anthropology at Pitzer College, Claremont, CA. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. from Harvard University, and her B.A. from Brown University. Dr. Strauss has expertise in the areas of cognitive anthropology; psychological anthropology; language, culture and society; race/class/gender variation in the U.S.; social theory and culture theory; discourse analysis; and anthropology of policy. Prior to joining the faculty at Pitzer, Dr. Strauss was Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. She has co-authored A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning with Naomi Quinn (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and is the co-editor of Human Motives and Cultural Models with Roy D'Andrade (Cambridge University Press, 1992).
MIRANDA YATES is a Fellow with the Institute and Regional Director at the Covenant House Institute, the largest provider of residential and supportive services for homeless youth in the Americas. The Covenant House Institute develops and coordinates research partnerships aimed at improving quality of services and advocacy for homeless youth. Dr. Yates received her B.A. from Georgetown University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from The Catholic University of America. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America and also worked as a project coordinator for the Menninger Foundation. With James Youniss, Dr. Yates co-authored Community Service and Social Responsibility in Youth (University of Chicago Press) and Roots of Civic Identity: International Perspectives on Community Service and Activism in Youth (Cambridge University Press). She received the Hershel Thornberg Dissertation Award from the Society for Research on Adolescence.
CURT MCPHAIL is a Fellow with the Institute and Program Officer at the Mary Black Foundation, a private foundation focused on early childhood development and active living in Spartanburg, SC. An avid cyclist and bike commuter, Curt is also the founder of globalbike, a non-profit organization that believes in the transformative power of bicycles to create social change throughout the developing world. Globalbike currently connects community care workers with bicycles in Zambia, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Rwanda and Bolivia. Prior to joining the Mary Black Foundation, Curt worked for Stop The Violence, a community based violence prevention organization. In this role, he organized residents of two of Spartanburg’s most violent neighborhoods around issues of housing and violence. A graduate of Wofford College, Curt spends his free time hiking, biking, or exploring the trails around the upstate of SC with his wife and two sons.
ANNA MIKULAK is a Graduate Fellow with the Institute and a doctoral student of Developmental Science at Georgetown University. She received her B.A. from Georgetown University in Psychology, with a minor in Cognitive Science. Previously, she conducted research investigating the possible immune system involvement in the etiology of autism-like behaviors. Having always been interested in the intersection of neuroscience, psychology, and policy, she hopes to learn more about how issues are framed and the effect of framing on both policymakers and the public. In her dissertation, she plans to investigate the various ways in which child development research is disseminated and understood.
SUZANNE LO is a Graduate Research Fellow with the Institute and an established public health researcher. She has conducted research at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and has been involved in clinical research at the National Institute for Drug Abuse (NIDA) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In her work at NIDA in particular, she was lead research associate and assisted in adolescent and adult protocols dealing with tobacco use, nicotine addiction and its treatment. In addition, Suzanne was lead associate on a Health Resources and Services Administration project under the Maternal and Child Health Bureau. She is the author of several manuscripts, has helped review manuscripts for journal publication, and has presented her work for national audiences. She is a Master’s candidate at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and holds a B.A. in Psychology.
Administration
BETH FISHER serves as FrameWorks' Director of Administration. After graduating with a Bachelors Degree in Communications from Towson University, Beth worked in some of Baltimore's leading advertising firms as a production manager. She spent ten years overseeing print production of numerous brochures, outdoor boards, print ads, posters, radio ads, and specialty items. During this time, Beth formed relationships with the industry's most talented printers, illustrators, photographers, and broadcast production facilities. At the same time, Beth was busy earning a Master's Degree in Early Childhood Development from Loyola College. For the past six years she's put her management and organizational skills to work for Frameworks Institute — helping to supervise projects of all sizes and complexities.
CHRISTINE NOLAN serves as an Administrative Associate with the Institute. She received her B.S. from Drexel University in Design and Merchandising. After serving several years in management within the retail industry, her focus moved to advertising and public relations. As a director of production for two of the Mid-Atlantic's top firms, Christine was responsible for purchasing and managing several million dollars in printing and production services annually. With over 13 years of field experience, Christine uses her leadership, communication and administrative skills to support FrameWorks' organizational development and project management.
