Austin Land is a Postdoctoral Scholar at CPL Berkeley and UPK Data and Applied Research Fellow with the California Department of Education’s Opportunities for All Branch. He recently completed his Ph.D. in Public Policy at UC-Berkeley. Austin’s research seeks to understand how public early care and education programs shape children’s developmental trajectories. His current projects focus on the design and sequencing of pre-kindergarten programs, which shape children’s subsequent academic achievement and social-emotional learning.

At CPL, Austin is part of a research team investigating the synergistic effects of California investments in early education programs with increases in K-12 funding. He also works directly with CDE’s Opportunities for All Branch, building infrastructure to integrate data across systems and conducting analyses to aid policy decision-making, in support of Universal Pre-Kindergarten expansion. His work is funded by the Heising-Simons Foundation and the William T. Grant Foundation.