Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) professors Philip Fisher and Maisha T. Winn have been appointed to endowed chairs, the highest honor the university can bestow on faculty.
Fisher, who has been at Stanford for two years, was named to the newly established Diana Chen Professorship; and Winn, who recently joined the GSE, was named to the Excellence in Learning Graduate School of Education Professorship, which was previously held by Fisher.
GSE Dean and Accelerator Faculty Director Dan Schwartz announced both Fisher and Winn’s appointments at a GSE faculty meeting on Oct. 8.
“Professor Fisher is an exceptional intellectual leader who not only generates discoveries and practical applications in his own work, he is also a field builder who brings together talent and helps faculty collaborate,” Schwartz wrote in nominating Fisher for the professorship.
In Winn’s nomination Schwartz said, “Professor Winn is one of those hires where everyone within Stanford and beyond is stunned that we managed to bring her to Stanford. And everyone is extremely excited that we did.”
“She seeks to understand how communities that have been depicted as under-resourced create practices, processes, and institutions of their own — and what we can learn from those examples to build more just, more collaborative, and more equitable futures,” she said.
Philip Fisher
Fisher joined the GSE in 2022 as a professor of education and, by courtesy, pediatrics. He is the faculty director of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood, an initiative of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning.
His research focuses on developing and evaluating scalable early childhood interventions in communities, and applying research on healthy development amid adversity to social policies and programs.
He has published more than 200 scientific papers in peer reviewed journals, and developed several evidence-based interventions for supporting healthy child development in the context of social and economic adversity. He was awarded the 2012 Society for Prevention Research Translational Science Award, and is a 2019 Fellow of the American Psychological Society.
Fisher received his Bachelor of Arts from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine; his master of science in clinical psychology from the University of Oregon, Eugene; and his doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Oregon.
He is the first person to hold the Diana Chen Professorship, which was established this month with a donation from entrepreneur and philanthropist Diana Chen. The endowment was created for a scholar whose research and teaching is in early childhood learning.
Maisha T. Winn
Winn joined the GSE on July 1 as professor of education and faculty director of the Accelerator’s initiative for Equity in Learning, and her research focuses on restorative justice and contemporary and historical perspectives in Black education.
She was named an American Educational Research Association Fellow in 2016, received the William T. Grant Foundation Distinguished Fellowship in 2014, and received the American Educational Research Association Early Career Award in 2012.
Winn was also a 2022-23 Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford, is an American Educational Research Association Fellow and the Association’s President-Elect, and a member of the National Academy of Education.
She is the second person to hold the Excellence in Learning Graduate School of Education Professorship, which was established in October 2022.
The endowment was created for a scholar who demonstrates a depth of excellence in the field of education and is committed to pursuing equitable, accessible, and effective learning for all.
Winn received her bachelor’s degree in English from the University of California, Davis; her master’s degree in Language, Literacy & Culture from Stanford; and her PhD in language, literacy and culture from the University of California, Berkeley.
