Elizabeth Marquardt Full Bio | CV | High Res Photo | Contact Elizabeth

Elizabeth Marquardt is editor of FamilyScholars.org, where she also blogs. She is vice president for family studies and director of the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values.

Marquardt is the co-investigator most recently of My Daddy’s Name is Donor, which examines the identity and kinship experiences of adults conceived through sperm donation and is based on a new representative sample. The study was the subject of reporting and commentary in the publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Slate, and abroad in outlets including Le Monde and the Irish Times. Marquardt is author of Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce (Crown, 2005). Based on the first nationally-representative study of grown children of divorce in the U.S., she argues that while an amicable divorce is better than a bitter one, even amicable divorces profoundly shape the inner lives of children. She is also co-principal investigator of a national study, Hooking Up, Hanging Out, and Hoping for Mr. Right: College Women on Dating and Mating Today.

Marquardt has appeared often on NBC’s Today Show as well as on broadcast news programs on CNN, ABC, FOX, CBS, and PBS and scores of radio programs including BBC World News and national and local NPR stations. Her writings have been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Slate, and elsewhere. She is a frequent presenter to academic and professional groups in the U.S. and internationally and her work has been covered widely.

She holds a Master’s in Divinity and an M.A. in international relations from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in history and women’s studies from Wake Forest University.

If you wish to interview or invite Elizabeth Marquardt as a speaker, please call 212-246-3942.

David Blankenhorn

David Blankenhorn is founder and president of the Institute for American Values, a nonpartisan organization devoted to strengthening families and civil society in the U.S. and the world.

Blankenhorn is the author of Fatherless America (Basic Books, 1995), The Future of Marriage (Encounter Books, 2007), and Thrift: A Cyclopedia (Templeton Foundation Press, 2008). He is the co-editor of eight books, including Franklin’s Thrift: The Lost History of an American Virtue (Templeton Press 2009).

A frequent lecturer, Blankenhorn’s articles have appeared in scores of publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The Public Interest, First Things, and Christianity Today. He has been profiled by the New York Times, USA Today, CBS Evening News and other news organizations, and has been featured on numerous national television programs, including Oprah, 20/20, CBS This Morning, The Today Show, Charlie Rose, ABC Evening News, and C-SPAN’s Washington Perspectives.

In 1977, he graduated magna cum laude in social studies from Harvard, where he was president of Phillips Brooks House, the campus community service center, and the recipient of a John Knox Fellowship. In 1978, he was awarded an M.A. with distinction in comparative social history from the University of Warwick in Coventry, England.

David Lapp

David Lapp is a research associate at the Institute for American Values, a nonpartisan organization devoted to strengthening families and civil society in the U.S. and the world. His research interests include courtship, marriage, and the family. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Education Week, and Public Discourse. In 2009, David graduated from The King’s College in New York City with a bachelor’s degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics.

Linda Malone-Colón

Linda Malone-Colón is a clinical and personality psychologist, researcher, consultant, and administrator. She is Chair of the Psychology Department at Hampton University, and the former Executive Director of the National Healthy Marriage Resource Center. Dr. Malone-Colón also designed and teaches a premier course on Black marriages for college students that has been featured at national conferences and in Essence magazine. She is also a noted scholar, national speaker, and consultant and has authored several important publications on African American marriage and families. Dr. Malone-Colón is also a professional development and diversity consultant and presents workshops, management training, and retreats for private industry and state and local government agencies.

In 2009, Dr. Malone-Colón founded the National Center on African American Marriages and Parenting. The Center brings together Black Churches and Black Institutions of Higher Education to help strengthen marriage, parenting and families in African American communities. Additionally, Dr. Malone-Colón is currently engaged in research and scholarship aimed at identifying protective and risk factors for African Americans in developing satisfying and stable marital relationships.

Dr. Malone-Colón has also been a professor at Foothill Community College in California and Dillard University in New Orleans and has taught in Medford and Boston, Massachusetts public schools. She has also conducted clinical assessments and counseling for children in the Child Development Center at Howard University and counseled public school teachers as a Co-Director of professional development program for the State of South Carolina. In addition, she founded and developed the University Counseling Center at Hampton University and was the Executive Director of the Center for eight years. In this capacity she also counseled students, faculty and staff with psychosocial concerns and provided psycho-educational workshops on and off campus.

David Popenoe

David Popenoe is Professor of Sociology Emeritus at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. In a forty-five year career at Rutgers he was chairman of the sociology department and graduate program, social and behavioral sciences dean, and founder and co-director of the university-based National Marriage Project, initiated in 1997. An internationally prominent family scholar, he is the author or editor of ten books including War over the Family (2005), Life Without Father: Compelling New Evidence that Fatherhood and Marriage are Indispensable for the Good of Children and Society (1996), Promises to Keep: Decline and Renewal of Marriage in America (1996), Disturbing the Nest: Family Change and Decline in Modern Societies (1988), and Sociology, an undergraduate textbook published in eleven editions beginning in 1971. He also has written numerous scholarly and popular articles, been widely interviewed by the leading national newspapers and journals, and made frequent appearances on television and radio.

As co-chair of the Council on Families in America, a national, nonpartisan group of scholars and family experts sponsored by the Institute for American Values, he was primary author of the Council’s widely-circulated 1995 report, Marriage in America: A Report to the Nation. Among his many research fellowships and grants are two Fulbright Research Scholarships to Sweden, a nation in which he has conducted extensive research on family and urban development issues. In the 1970s, he was chairman of the board of the American Institute of Family Relations in Los Angeles, the nation’s first family counseling and research organization, founded by his father in 1930. He holds the Ph.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears

Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears was the youngest person and first woman to serve as a Superior Court Judge in Fulton County, Georgia, and when appointed to the Supreme Court of Georgia by Governor Zell Miller, she became the first woman and youngest person ever to serve on that Court. In retaining her appointed position as a Supreme Court Justice, Chief Justice Sears also became the first woman to win a contested state-wide election in Georgia. In July 2005, she became the first woman to serve as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Georgia.

Chief Justice Sears received her undergraduate degree from Cornell University in 1976 and her Juris Doctor from Emory University School of Law in 1980. She earned a Master’s Degree in appellate judicial process from the University of Virginia in 1994 and has honorary doctor of laws degrees from Morehouse College, John Marshall University, Clark-Atlanta University, LaGrange College and Piedmont College. She is also the recipient of the Emory Medal, Emory University’s highest honor.

In 2009, Chief Justice Sears retired from the Supreme Court of Georgia after 27 years of service in the judiciary. After her retirement, she joined Schiff Hardin, LLC in its Atlanta office as a partner in the Litigation Group, where she currently practices general and appellate litigation, as well as handles corporate compliance issues. In addition to practicing law, Chief Justice Sears is dedicating her first year off the bench to working on issues in family law. She is a visiting professor on contemporary issues in family law at the University of Georgia School of Law for the 2009-2010 academic year, and she also serves as the William Thomas Sears Distinguished Fellow in Family Law at the Institute for American Values.

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead has written widely on marriage, divorce, contemporary courtship and child well-being for such publications as the Atlantic Monthly, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

She is the author of The Divorce Culture: Rethinking Our Commitments to Marriage and the Family (1997) and Why There Are No Good Men Left: The Romantic Plight of the New Single Woman. (2003). Her 1993 Atlantic Monthly article, “Dan Quayle Was Right” won an EMMA award from the National Women’s Political Caucus and was featured in the 150-year retrospective, The American Idea: The Best of the Atlantic Monthly (2007).

A co-director of Rutgers’ National Marriage Project for nine years, Whitehead is the newly named director of the John Templeton Center for Thrift and Generosity at the Institute for American Values. She is the lead researcher and author of For A New Thrift: Confronting the Debt Culture, an Institute for American Values-led report that New York Times columnist David Brooks called “one of the most important think tank reports” of 2008. For the next few years, she will be exploring how families can get out of debt and build assets.

Whitehead grew up in Appleton, Wisconsin, the oldest of eight children. She attended public schools, received a BA in history from the University of Wisconsin and attended Columbia University on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. In May 1968, she and her husband left Columbia and moved to Chicago. She later attended the University of Chicago on a Ford Foundation Fellowship and received an MA and PhD in American history.

W. Bradford Wilcox

W. Bradford Wilcox is Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, and a member of the James Madison Society at Princeton University.

He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia and his Ph.D. at Princeton University. Prior to coming to the University of Virginia, he held research fellowships at Princeton University, Yale University and the Brookings Institution.

Mr. Wilcox’s research focuses on marriage and cohabitation, and on the ways that gender, religion, and children influence the quality and stability of American family life. He has published articles on marriage, cohabitation, parenting, and fatherhood in The American Sociological Review, Social Forces, The Journal of Marriage and Family and The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. His first book, Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands, (Chicago, 2004) examines the ways in which the religious beliefs and practices of American Protestant men influence their approach to parenting, household labor, and marriage. Mr. Wilcox is now researching the effect that gender norms, children, commitment, and religion have on the quality of contemporary American marriages.

Professor Wilcox has received the following two awards from the American Sociological Association Religion Section for his research: the Best Graduate Paper Award and the Best Article Award (with Brian Steensland et al.). His research has also been featured in The Washington Post, USA Today, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, CBS News, and numerous NPR stations.

Professor Wilcox teaches courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels in statistics, family, and religion.

Stephanie Blessing

Stephanie Blessing is a Christian, the wife of a pastor, and the mother of five children. She found out in May 2009, at the age of 32 years old, that she was conceived in 1976 by an anonymous sperm donor via artificial insemination. Like many adults who discover that they were conceived using this method, she suddenly found herself in a crisis moment. She quickly went to the internet in order to find some kind of assistance in helping her to reason through this new situation in her life from a biblical worldview. After searching for several weeks, she found that, aside from some clinical articles, no one was talking about this issue from a God-centered perspective. She has begun writing about her own story in order to share the hope that she has with others at her blog, My Father’s Daughter.

Stephanie has been a mentor to several teenage girls, has volunteered at a pregnancy center in her area, leads the women’s ministry in her church, and is very interested in Biblical apologetics.

Naomi Cahn

Naomi Cahn is the John Theodore Fey Research Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School. Her areas of expertise include family law, adoption law, and reproductive technology. She has co-authored several books, including Red Families v. Blue Families (OUP 2010)(with Prof. June Carbone), Contemporary Family Law (Thomson/West 2d ed. 2009); and Families By Law: An Adoption Reader (NYU Press 2004. Test Tube Families: Why the Fertility Market Needs Legal Regulation (NYU Press) was published in 2009, and she is working on a book tentatively titled, The New Kinship: Donor-Conceived Family Connections. She is a Senior Fellow at the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, and is a board Member of the Donor Sibling Registry.

June Carbone

June Carbone is the Edward A. Smith/Missouri Chair of Law, the Constitution and Society at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. She previously served as Associate Dean for Professional Development and Presidential Professor of Ethics and the Common Good at Santa Clara University School of Law. She received her J.D. from the Yale Law School, and her A.B. from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. She teaches Property, Family Law, Assisted Reproduction and Bioethics. She has written From Partners to Parents: The Second Revolution in Family Law (Columbia University Press, 2000), the third and fourth editions of Family Law with Leslie Harris and the late Lee Teitelbaum (Aspen, 2005, 2009), and Red Families v. Blue Families with Naomi Cahn (Oxford University Press, 2010).

Dale Carpenter

Professor Dale Carpenter teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, the First Amendment, and sexual orientation and the law, at the University of Minnesota Law School. In 2007, he was appointed to the Earl R. Larson Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Law. He was the Julius E. Davis Professor of Law for 2006-07 and the Vance K. Opperman Research Scholar for 2003-04. Professor Carpenter was chosen the Stanley V. Kinyon Teacher of the Year for 2003-04 and 2005-06 and was the Tenured Teacher of the Year for 2006-07. Since 2004, he has served as an editor of Constitutional Commentary.

Professor Carpenter received his B.A. degree in history, magna cum laude, from Yale College in 1989. He received his J.D., with honors, from the University of Chicago Law School in 1992. At the University of Chicago he was Editor-in-Chief of the University of Chicago Law Review.

He received both the D. Francis Bustin Prize for excellence in legal scholarship and the John M. Olin Foundation Scholarship for Law & Economics.

Professor Carpenter clerked for The Honorable Edith H. Jones of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit from 1992 to 1993. After his clerkship, he practiced at Vinson & Elkins in Houston and at Howard, Rice, Nemerovski, Canady, Falk & Rabkin in San Francisco. He is a member of the state bars of Texas and California.

He is a frequent television, radio, and print commentator on constitutional law, the First Amendment, and sexual orientation and the law.

Karen Clark

Karen Clark found out at 18, after her dad had passed away, that she had been conceived through anonymous sperm donation in 1966. However, it wasn’t until after she had children of her own and realized that her donor-conceived status affects them as well, that she began to actively pursue more information about her biological father’s identity. Karen has been active in donor conception advocacy issues for the past 4 years by encouraging openness and identity release but acknowledges the inherent emotional, social, and ethical difficulties and challenges involved with the practice of donor conception.

Her story was published in the American Adoption Congress Newsletter (The Decree—vol. 23, no. 3, 2007) and she has written 2 essays for Voices of Donor Conception: Behind Closed Doors—Moving Beyond Secrecy and Shame. Karen spoke at the 11th Annual Institute for American Values Symposium (2006) at The New York City Bar Association in response to Elizabeth Marquardt’s study, The Revolution in Parenthood: The Emerging Global Clash Between Adult Rights and Children’s Needs; The World Youth Alliance Symposium on Assisted Reproductive Technologies and the Human Person (2008) at the United Nations, New York City; The Infertility Network’s seminar “Getting It Right: Putting Ethics at the Core of Gamete Donation Practice” (2008) in Toronto, Canada and the “Families Created through Donor and Surrogacy, Conversations for Parents” workshop in November 2009 in New York City.

Karen is a co-investigator, with Elizabeth Marquardt and Norval Glenn, of My Daddy’s Name is Donor study (a representative, comparative study of young adults conceived through sperm donation) through the Institute for American Values.

Bill Coffin

Bill Coffin, the Special Assistant for Marriage Education, joined the Administration for Children and Families in Jan 2002. He is helping to orchestrate an important culture change, where those who marry will have better access to knowledge and skills to form and sustain a healthy marriage. In recognition of his work he was awarded the 2006 Smart Marriages Impact Award. Bill spent most of the previous 3 decades working for the Navy, initially on active duty and then as a civilian in the Navy’s Family Support Program Headquarters in DC.

His passion is marriage education and enrichment. Bill served as the Marriage Preparation Coordinator for the Archdiocese of Washington and as a consultant to the U.S. Bishops Committee on Marriage and Family Life. He co-authored a book chapter on Preventive Interventions for Couples. He is also the author of “Marriage.gov” (2009) in H. Benson & S. Callan (Eds) What Works in Relationship Education? Lessons from Academics and Service Deliverers in the United States and Europe. See http://www.relationshipeducation.info.

Bill is a graduate of Fairfield University in CT and has two master’s degrees, one in Human Relations, and one in Counseling.

Bill and Pat have been married for 41 years. Pat was a reading specialist in an elementary school before she retired last June. They have four children and six grandchildren.

Maggie Gallagher

Maggie Gallagher is the Chairman and co-founder of the National Organization for Marriage, a nationally sydnicated columnist, and the co-author of three books on marriage include The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier Healthier and Better-off Financially (with University of Chciago Prof. Linda J. Waite).

Her next book, Debating Same-Sex Marriage (co-authored with Prof. John Corvino), will be released by Oxford University Press.

Amber Lapp

Amber Lapp is co-investigator of the Love and Marriage in Middle America project, a study sponsored by the Institute for American Values on the family formation of young adults in one small town in Ohio. She has also taught high school history, government, and economics at Evangel Christian High School, a private school in New York City. In 2009, Lapp graduated from The King’s College in New York City with a bachelor’s degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics.

Olivia Pratten

In the fall of 2008, Olivia Pratten launched the first ever class action lawsuit by sperm donor offspring in North America. The lawsuit is against the Attorney General of British Columbia and the College of Physicians and Surgeons of that province.

Olivia Pratten was conceived via an anonymous sperm donor after her parents struggled to overcome their infertility. Told about her conception at the age of 5 and encouraged to think and feel for herself, Olivia has always wanted to know where she came from. Though raised by two loving parents, she grew up questioning and challenging the anonymous donor system. Following in the footsteps of her activist parents, Olivia began to speak out at the age of 16 to politicians, policy makers and media. She aims to see the end of donor anonymity through regulation of the infertility industry.

The lawsuit seeks the immediate and ultimately the permanent protection and preservation of all files related to the practice of gamete donation in British Columbia. The lawsuit claims that the present law discriminates against persons who were conceived as a result of gamete donation. By contrast, adopted children have, by law, certain legal rights and opportunities to know about their biological parents that children conceived by way of gamete donation simply do not enjoy. The suit goes before the British Columbia court in 2010.

She has a masters degree from Columbia University and currently works as a reporter in Toronto.

Alana S.

Alana S. is a donor-conceived adult and creative professional devoted to extending the impact of organizations like Family Scholars through evocative music and storytelling. Alana became an activist and child advocate while writing her upcoming film, Adam & Eva, a narrative screenplay from the perspective of a young woman conceived via artificial insemination, who chooses to sell her own eggs for the money she needs to independently investigate her ancestry. Alana has been interviewed by Womens’ Health Magazine and Elizabeth Marquardt of My Daddy’s Name is Donor (a representative, comparative study of young adults conceived through sperm donation) and is a major contributor to an upcoming documentary from Brooklyn-based film company Rumur Productions on her experiences as a donor-conceived adult. Alana fuses her feelings on motherhood and family often with her music, which can be found at www.myspace.com/missalanastewart or on iTunes.

Amy Ziettlow

The Rev. Amy Ziettlow currently serves as the chief operating officer at Hospice of Baton Rouge. Ordained in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America 2001, Ziettlow served as associate pastor at Our Redeemer Lutheran Church in Marion, IL and as hospice chaplain for VNA Hospice of Illinois. Ziettlow has worked for Hospice of Baton Rouge since October 2004.

Ziettlow was a contributing author to the book, Voices of Faith from the Midst of the Storm, a collection of clergy writings collected after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. She currently serves as a Louisiana representative on the Lutheran Social Services of the South Board of Directors. While living in Illinois, she served as the Southern Conference Clergy Representative on the ELCA’s Central/Southern Illinois Synod’s Task Force on Human Sexuality.

Ziettlow earned a bachelor of arts in letters from the University of Oklahoma, where she danced and toured with the Oklahoma Festival Ballet Company. She also earned a master of divinity at the University of Chicago.