Cynthia Osborne
Associate Dean for Academic Strategies; Director, Center for Health and Social Policy; Director, Child and Family Research Partnership; Director, Prenatal-to-Three Policy Impact Center
Education
- Ph.D. in Demography and Public Affairs, Princeton University, 2003
- MPP, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 1999
- M.A. in Education, Claremont Graduate University, 1995
- B.A. in Economics and Psychology, Claremont McKenna College, 1991
Research Areas
- Family Demography
- Child and Family Wellbeing
- Social Policy
Teaching Areas
- Research and Empirical Methods
- Social Policy
Cynthia Osborne is the associate dean for academic strategies and director of the Center for Health and Social Policy (CHASP) at the LBJ School. She is also the founder and director of the Child and Family Research Partnership (CFRP), a group that conducts rigorous research on policy issues related to young children, adolescents and their parents. She most recently launched the new national Prenatal-to-Three Policy Impact Center at CFRP, specializing in evidence-informed state policies that strengthen outcomes for infants and toddlers. Osborne holds a Ph.D. in demography and public affairs from Princeton University, a Master in Public Policy degree from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and a Master of Arts in education from Claremont Graduate University. Her teaching and research interests include social policy issues, poverty and inequality, family and child well-being, early childhood, fatherhood and family demography. Osborne is an appointed member of the National Academies of Sciences Committee to Reduce Child Poverty by Half in Ten Years. 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 previously was director of the Project on Education Effectiveness and Quality, an initiative that measured state educator preparation programs’ influence on student achievement.
Media Expertise
- Family and Child Welfare
- Welfare
- Family demography
- Early childhood
- Inequality
- Marriage
- Politics
- Social policy
A new prenatal-to-three policy initiative in the Child and Family Research Partnership (CFRP) at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin will be a resource for state leaders as they develop and implement evidence-informed policies that improve outcomes for all infants, toddlers and their families.
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Professors and students from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin will lead conversations and present research across an array of policy areas at the 2019 Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) Fall Research Conference in Denver, Colorado Nov. 7–9.
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Core to the LBJ School's mission is "getting it done" — developing solutions to policy problems through scholarship and public discourse. Every year, faculty and students take on research that melds the theoretical and the practical, exploring the world through hands-on field work and data analysis to address issues critical to the health of American democracy and global society. Innovation Bound celebrates the impact, quality and range of the published works of our distinguished scholars.
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