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The award will recognize an individual’s own intellectual contributions that reflect cumulative accomplishments and establishment of an excellent publication record of research on families and children, ideally with public policy relevance and implications. Consideration will be given to an individual’s mentoring of other scholars who have made notable contributions to research on children and families; the latter would reflect the cumulative and generative effects of mentoring early career scholars whose work contributes toward the same ends of illuminating family circumstance and enhancing child wellbeing.

Over the course of her career, Sara McLanahan made foundational contributions toward understanding family circumstances and change, illuminating how to enhance the wellbeing of children, and improving public policy to better meet the needs of families and children. She was among the first to describe the implications of divorce and single parenthood for children, she developed a prescient new (and ongoing) study focused on unmarried parents and their children – the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. She identified the growing inequality in children’s outcomes/experiences as a result of different family patterns by socioeconomic status (‘diverging destinies’). After 11 years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she began as a postdoc and rose from assistant to full professor, she moved to Princeton University in 1990, where she was founding Director of the Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing and became Editor-in-Chief of the Future of Children journal.