Photo of Dr. Gary Henry

Gary T. Henry, PhD, holds the Patricia and H. Rodes Hart Chair and serves as Professor of Public Policy and Education in the Department of Leadership, Policy and Organization, Peabody College, Vanderbilt University. Professor Henry teaches a doctoral course in Causal Inference and a graduate course on Evaluation at Vanderbilt. In 2016, he was named an American Educational Research Association Fellow. He formerly held the Duncan MacRae ’09 and Rebecca Kyle MacRae Distinguished Professorship of Public Policy in the Department of Public Policy and directed the Carolina Institute for Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Also, he is a Fellow with the Frank Porter Graham Institute for Child Development.

Henry specializes in education policy, educational evaluation, teacher quality research, and quantitative research methods. He has published extensively in top journals such as Science, Educational Researcher, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Journal of Teacher Education, Education Finance and Policy, and Evaluation Review. Professor Henry has received over $20 million dollars of sponsored research funding and his research has been funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, Spencer Foundation, Lumina Foundation, National Institute for Early Childhood Research, Walton Family Foundation, and numerous state legislatures, governors’ offices, and agencies. Currently, his major educational research projects are the evaluation of North Carolina Transformation program; the evaluation of the Achievement School District, a part of Tennessee’s First to the Top initiative; and the evaluation of the leadership pipeline in Hamilton County (Chattanooga, TN), Tennessee. Other recent projects include the evaluation of the North Carolina Race to the Top initiatives, North Carolina’s Disadvantaged Student Supplemental Fund, as well as Georgia’s Universal Pre-K and HOPE Scholarship programs. Henry serves as panel chair for the Educational Systems and Broad Reform panel and previously served as a principal member of the Standing Committee for Systemic Reform, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education and has served on numerous advisory boards and as a consultant for several states on evaluations and longitudinal databases.