Felice Levine to Leave AERA in 2025
Social psychologist Felice Levine, who has served as executive director of the American Educational Research Association for more than 22 years, will step down in 2025. The announcement came in a June 18 joint letter from Levine and current AERA President Janelle T. Scott.
Founded in 1916, AERA – with its more than 25,000 members — is the largest national interdisciplinary research association devoted to the scientific study of education and learning. It publishes seven academic journals, including AERA Open, one of the earliest open-access journals offered by a major social science scholarly society.
“Simply put, I have the ‘best job in town’—across hemispheres and continents,” Levine wrote. “As I look ahead to the next phases of my career and engagement in our field, the AERA ED job will always be at the top of professional roles in my life.”
The same letter noted that Scott and Immediate AERA Past President Howard would launch a search this summer to replace Levine. Two other AERA past presidents, Na’ilah Suad Nasir and Deborah Loewenberg Ball, will chair that effort.
Before serving five terms as the AERA executive director, Levine was executive officer of the American Sociological Association and, before that, director of the Law and Social Science Program at the National Science Foundation and a senior research social scientist at the American Bar Foundation.
Levine studied sociology and psychology at the University of Chicago, and her early research focused on what underlies aggression, compliance, senses of justice, and at-risk and social behaviors in children, youth, and adults. She was the senior author of the 1996 report from the American Sociological Association, The Social Causes of Violence: Crafting a Science Agenda.
At AERA, her work has often examined more expansive issues of access, capacity and process at the nexus of the academic, scientific and government spheres. She has served as principal investigator of the AERA-NSF Grants Program and has worked as a co-lead on projects such as developing an NSF-funded data hub on STEM education, an NSF initiative academic support for open science products, and the impact of COVID-19 on doctoral students and early-career education researchers.
Levine is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Educational Research Association, and the Association for Psychological Science and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.
