Center Leadership

Center Director

Greg Roberts, Ph.D., is Director of the VGC and Associate Director of The Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk. He is the Principal Investigator and Director of the Special Education Strand of the Center on Instruction and Principal Investigator for the Texas Reading First Initiative and the Dissemination Core of the Texas Center for Learning Disabilities. Dr. Roberts has an undergraduate degree in special education and is trained as an educational psychologist, with expertise in quantitative methods, measurement, and program evaluation. He has provided external evaluation for projects in education, health care, and industry. Recent projects have included the state-level evaluations of the Hawaii Reading First Initiative, the Oregon Reading First Initiative, and the Alabama Reading First Initiative. He was also the evaluator of PiHanaNaMamo, a project funded by the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) supporting native Hawaiian high school students in special education, and is currently evaluating Washington state’s implementation of response to intervention (RTI). He has published in tier 1 multidisciplinary journals and contributed chapters to books on reading instruction, measurement, and RTI.

Executive Director of The Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk (MCPER)

Sharon Vaughn, Ph.D., is the H. E. Hartfelder/Southland Corp. Regents Chair in Human Development. She is the author of numerous books and research articles that address the reading and social outcomes of students with learning difficulties. She is currently the Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator on several Institute for Education Science and Office of Special Education Programs research grants investigating effective interventions for students with reading difficulties and students who are English language learners. She is also Principal Investigator on a NICHD grant examining response to intervention in younger and older readers.