Donna Spiker

Donna Spiker, Ph.D., is program manager of the Early Childhood Program in SRI's Center for Education and Human Services. She is a nationally known developmental psychologist with extensive experience designing and conducting research and evaluations on the effects of early intervention, early care and education, and school readiness programs and services for infants and young children and their families. She has strong expertise regarding the development and assessment of infants, toddlers, and young children with disabilities and other risk conditions, including autism, developmental delay, Down syndrome, behavioral disorders, low birth weight, and poverty, and programs and services to support them.

Currently, Spiker co-leads subcontracts as the independent evaluator for two U.S. Department of Education Investing in Innovation grants. One grant with the Erikson Institute is to evaluate a preschool to third grade early math professional development model, and the other is with the University of Minnesota to evaluate a multisite expansion of the Chicago Child-Parent Center preschool to third grade model.

Spiker was the principal investigator of the evaluation of the Saint Paul Early Childhood Scholarship Pilot Program for the Minnesota Early Learning Foundation, an innovative market-based early childhood model to increase the access to and quality of preschool and child care programs for children living in low-income neighborhoods. She also led a subcontract to the Erikson Institute to evaluate the Illinois Early Childhood Block Grant Program (statewide birth through age 5 programs) for the Illinois State Board of Education.

Spiker is associate director of the national Early Childhood Outcomes (ECO) Center for the Office of Special Education Programs of the U.S. Department of Education assisting states to build high-quality outcomes measurement systems. She recently completed a grant to conduct secondary data analysis with a national Head Start dataset. She previously co-directed the Statewide Evaluation of First 5 California Funded Programs, with primary responsibility for evaluation of the First 5 initiatives to support school readiness and promote universal developmental screening.

She also co-directed the National Early Intervention Longitudinal Study (NEILS), the first study of early intervention for infant and toddlers with disabilities and their families with a nationally representative sample. Previously at Stanford University, she served as clinical director of an autism genetics study, was chief psychologist in the Stanford Autism Clinic for nearly 10 years, and was deputy director of the Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP), a multi-site randomized study of early intervention for low birth weight infants and toddlers..

Spiker has authored numerous articles and book chapters about the development and assessment of infants and young children. She is a frequent presenter at national and international professional conferences and consults on research and clinical early childhood projects across the United States. She serves on the editorial boards of a number of journals devoted to research about young children, is a Fellow in the Division of Developmental Disabilities and Mental Retardation of the American Psychological Association, and is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of London.

Spiker earned her Ph.D. in child development from the University of Minnesota.