Dr. Cynthia Osborne is the founder and executive director of the national Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center, home of the 50-state Prenatal-to-3 State Policy Roadmap and the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Clearinghouse. She recently joined the faculty at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development as a Professor of Early Childhood Education and Policy. Previously, she was faculty at LBJ School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin for over 16 years and served as the Associate Dean for Academic Strategies for the last 3-1/2 years.
In 2012 Osborne founded and directed the successful Child and Family Research Partnership (CFRP), a nonpartisan research group at the LBJ School engaged in rigorous qualitative and quantitative research and evaluation work for federal and state agencies and large non-governmental organizations to strengthen families and enhance public policy. Major research areas included early childhood investments, family supports, fatherhood, child welfare, and adolescent health. CFRP’s evaluation services will transition to the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center at Vanderbilt University in early 2022.
Osborne was an appointed member of the well-known National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) Committee to Reduce Child Poverty by Half in Ten Years and is currently serving on another NASEM committee, Exploring the Opportunity Gap for Young Children Birth through Age 8. She is the elected Vice President of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) Policy Council, the leadership team responsible for setting policy and strategy for the association. She is also a member of the National Early Relational Health Advisory Panel at the Center for the Study of Social Policy.
Osborne previously served as director of the Project on Education Effectiveness and Quality, an initiative at the LBJ School that measured state educator preparation programs’ influence on student achievement. She also served as the Chair of the Responsible Fatherhood working group for the Fatherhood Research and Practice Network (FRPN), a long-term project of the federal Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation.
Osborne’s teaching and research interests are in the areas of social policy, poverty and inequality, family and child wellbeing, and family demography. She has extensive experience leading long-term evaluations of state and national programs, with the aim of helping organizations understand what works, and how to ensure sustainable implementation of effective policies. Her work includes evaluations of one of the largest home visiting programs in the country (Texas) and many critical state-level child welfare and child support programs.
Osborne holds a Ph.D. in Demography and Public Affairs from Princeton University, a Master in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and a Master of Arts in Education from Claremont Graduate University.
Previously, Dr. Osborne taught middle school in a lower-income school in California, which she considers the toughest and most rewarding job she has had. She enjoys spending time with her husband and two adult daughters, as well as spoiling their three large beasts (dogs). She is also an avid reader of nonfiction and historical fiction novels, and reads a paper copy of the New York Times each morning.
