Joseph Sparling, Ph.D., is an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne (Australia) and a Fellow at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina. Professor Sparling's 50-year career has been focused on bringing educational opportunities to needy families with children from birth though age 5. With Professor Craig Ramey, he developed an early educational program known as the Abecedarian Approach.

Duncan spent the first 25 years of my career at the University of Michigan working on and ultimately directing the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data collection project. Since 1968, the PSID has collected economic, demographic, health, behavior and attainment data from a representative sample of U.S. individuals and the households in which they reside. With these and other data he studied the economic mobility of the U.S. population, both within and across generations, with a particular focus on low-income families.