Russ Whitehurst is a nonresident senior fellow in the Center on Education Data and Policy at the Urban Institute. He previously was director of the Brown Center on Education Policy and a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution. As the founding director of the Institute of Education Sciences within the US Department of Education, Whitehurst is widely acknowledged to have had a transforming effect on the rigor and relevance of education research. In his earlier career as a developmental psychologist, he carried out seminal research on early literacy, language development, and preschool education. A program he developed to enhance language development in children from low-income families, dialogic reading, is used in preschools around the world. Whitehurst has received numerous professional awards, including the Microsoft Innovators in Higher Education Award, the Peter H. Rossi Award of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, and the Robert Boruch Award of the Campbell Collaboration.