The Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE) recently recognized A. Brooks Bowden, an assistant professor in the policy, organizations, leadership and systems division of GSE, for her impressive contributions to education research.

The SREE Early Career Awards highlight researchers whose work is both rigorous and relevant to educational practice. Dr. Bowden, an assistant professor of education policy at Penn GSE, was one of three winners who received the award at the 2022 SREE Conference on September 23.

In her research, Dr. Bowden focuses on strategies to overcome obstacles like hunger, housing insecurity, and mental health problems, which prevent children from getting the most out of school. She studies the economic benefits of those strategies and how to integrate evaluations of their costs and payoffs into randomized control trials. Her work has led to policy changes with significant impacts on the lives of children.

A nomination for Dr. Bowden summarized her achievements by describing her as “an accomplished academic whose contributions to developing and applying methods of cost analysis in education research and causal program evaluation are hard to overstate.” The nomination also noted her reputation as a thoughtful scholar and mentor whose “focus on student development has already ensured her impact on the next generation of scholars.”

In 2021, Dr. Bowden became the director of the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education (CBCSE), the nation’s leading policy and research center focused on the costs and benefits of education interventions. She recently co-authored the first national guidelines for Integrated Student Support and is an editor of the policy journal of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.