Bronwyn Bevan

Bronwyn Bevan, who joined Wallace in 2019, leads the foundation’s research activities, by shaping learning strategies and commissioning research studies that can build the evidence base in the foundation’s focus areas of the arts, education leadership, and youth development.

Before arriving at Wallace, Bevan was a senior research scientist at the University of Washington, where her research examined how science learning can be organized to empower individuals and communities. Before that, she worked for more than two decades at the San Francisco Exploratorium, where she led the research on learning programs and supervised the teaching and learning programs, including teacher professional development programs. Over the past 25 years, she has served as a principal or co-principal investigator on more than two dozen federally or privately funded projects, most supported by the National Science Foundation.

Bevan has served on many national and international committees, including the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Successful Out-of-School STEM Learning and its Committee to Assess the NASA Science Activation Portfolio. She has published some 20 peer-reviewed journal articles, authored over two dozen book chapters and practitioner-facing papers, and produced books on the topics of learning in out of school time settings (2012), research-practice partnerships (2018), and equity in museums (2021). She was previously a section editor and editorial board member of Science Education. She currently serves on the boards of the Wellesley Centers for Women, Concord Consortium, and Guerilla Science International, as well as numerous advisory boards. 

Bevan received a B.A. from Barnard College, Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in urban education from the Graduate Center, City University of New York.