UB’s Lois Weis elected to National Academy of Education

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Lois Weis, PhD, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy in the University at Buffalo Graduate School of Education (GSE), has been elected to the National Academy of Education (NAEd).

This is the highest honor available to educational scholars and Weis is the first member of the UB GSE faculty to be a member of the prestigious group.

She is one of only 200 U.S. members and 25 foreign associate members of the Academy, all elected because of their outstanding contributions to educational research and policy development.

“Professor Weis’ membership is well deserved,” says Jaekyung Lee, interim dean, Graduate School of Education, “and it will help raise the reputation of our school and standard of scholarship for all faculty members in GSE.”

Weis is considered one of the world’s most prominent researchers on economic and social class issues as they broadly relate to schools and educational institutions. Her ethnographic research has provided new ways to understand the connections among social class, race, gender, schooling and the global economy. She is widely known for breaking new theoretical and methodological ground related to these issues.

Weis has been a prolific scholar throughout her 35-year career, having authored or co-authored 23 books, 60 journal articles and 45 book chapters. Her research has been supported by generous grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Association for Institutional Research (AIR), Spencer Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation. She has been on the editorial boards of numerous leading journals in education.

Weis has written extensively about the current predicament of white, African-American and Latino/Latina working class and poor youth and young adults. Her research focuses on the complex role gender and race/ethnicity play in their lives in light of contemporary dynamics associated with the global knowledge economy, new patterns of emigration, and the movement of cultural and economic capital across national boundaries.

Most recently Weis served as an editor of the American Educational Research Journal, widely considered the most prestigious research journal in the education field. 

Weis is a winner of the outstanding book award from the Gustavus Meyers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America. She is an honorary fellow of the American Educational Research Association, and has delivered invited lectures worldwide, most recently at the University of Southampton, UK; Minzu University of China; Beijing Normal University; and the University of Almeria, Spain.

Founded in 1965, the mission of the National Academy of Education is to advance the highest quality education research and promote its use in policy formulation and practice. The members serve on expert study panels that address pressing issues in education. They also are engaged in such NAEd professional development programs as the NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship Program and the NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship Program.  

Nominations to the academy are submitted once a year by current NAEd members for review and election by the entire membership.