Frank Kessel, Professor of early childhood multicultural education and Senior fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center for Health Policy at University of New Mexico
The workshop series International Dialogue on Education Berlin is a joint initiative of the British Council Germany, the German Academic Exchange Service, the German-American Fulbright Commission, the Australian Group of Eight and the Canadian Bureau for International Education in Berlin.
Through the contributions of international participants the series aims to enrich the debate on science, research and higher education policy in Germany, to place German perspectives in a global context and to learn from positive examples from other countries.
Frank Kessel
Dr. Frank Kessel is a senior fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center for Health Policy and professor of early childhood multicultural education at the University of New Mexico (UNM).
Prior to joining UNM in the fall of 2005, Kessel completed a 12-year spell as Program Director for the Culture, Health and Human Development Program at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in New York.
Also responsible for SSRC initiatives at the intersection of the social, psychological and bio-medical sciences, he has consulted with Canadian groups engaged in inter-disciplinary research on health, advised the National Cancer Institute on its “Science of Team Science” initiative, and contributed to several national and international conferences and publications in the area of Inter/Trans-Disciplinarity.
Also, building on his work with the SSRC’s Program on the Arts, Kessel guided the School of
American Ballet through a process that laid the ground for significant institutional innovation.
With a primary interest in human development and ancillary issues in the philosophy and
history of psychology and the social sciences, as well as matters at the intersection of psychology with education and the humanities, Kessel has held academic positions at the University of Houston, the University of Alberta, and the University of Cape Town. He has also been involved in international early education efforts, first as Research Director of the Early Learning Centre in Cape Town and then as Scientific Associate at the Bernard van Leer Foundation in The Hague. His further connection to the philanthropy sector came as Senior Program Associate at the William T. Grant Foundation in New York.
A major thread in most of these endeavours is Kessel’s commitment to facilitating creative
conversations across conventional disciplinary and sub-disciplinary lines. This has been reflected in the numerous conferences and symposia he has organised and the range of volumes he has edited, but perhaps most completely in Kessel’s programmatic work at the SSRC, where he helped bring to fruition the collective work of a variety of inter-disciplinary, sometimes international, groups of scholars. In a related vein, he has consistently been concerned with the reciprocal engagement of research and scholarship with broader social issues.
Kessel is an elected Fellow of both the American Psychological Association and the
Association for Psychological Science and a member of several other professional organizations.
He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and his M.A. at the University of Cape Town.
