Our Advisory Board

Ronald F. Ferguson is an MIT-trained economist who focuses social science research on economic, social, and educational challenges.  He has been on the faculty at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government since 1983, after full time appointments at Brandeis and Brown Universities. In 2014, he co-founded Tripod Education Partners and shifted into an adjunct role at the Kennedy School, where he remains a fellow at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy and faculty director of the university-wide Achievement Gap Initiative (AGI).

During the 1980s and ‘90s Ron focused much his attention on economic and community development. That work culminated in the social science synthesis volume Urban Problems and Community Development (1999), which remains an important text in graduate policy courses.

By the late1980s he had begun to study education and youth development because academic skill disparities were contributing to growing wage disparity. During the 1990s and early 2000s, his writings on the topic appeared in publications of the National Research Council, the Brookings Institution, the U.S. Department of Education, and various books and journals. In December 2007, Harvard Education Press published his book Toward Excellence with Equity: An Emerging Vision for Closing the Achievement Gap. A February 2011 profile of Ron in the New York Times wrote, “there is no one in America who knows more about the gap that Ronald Ferguson.”

Ron’s current focus as AGI director is an initiative entitled the Boston Basics that is spreading to other cities in a Basics National Network. It takes a socio-ecological saturation approach, collaborating with many partners to reach extended families with caregiving advice for infants and toddlers. In addition, Ron is co-authoring a book with journalist Tatsha Robertson on the ways that highly successful people were parented.

Ron holds an undergraduate degree from Cornell University and a PhD from MIT, both in economics. He has been happily married for 38 years and is the father of two adult sons.

A master educator, Lissa spent nearly 30 years as a teacher and administrator at Buckingham Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge. Lissa graduated from Radcliffe College, and after two years of being a third-grade classroom teacher, she went to Bank Street College in New York City to learn about and work in urban schools. Her abiding interest in helping teachers become professionals finally led her to the Graduate School of Education at Harvard where she began to supervise student teachers in the urban schools. At Harvard, she had several different roles: member of the Board of Freshman Advisors; research assistant for Howard Gardner, Vito Perrone, and David Perkins in developing the “Teaching for Understanding” framework; administrator of the Undergraduate Teacher Education Program; instructor in the Harvard Extension School Writing Program; seminar leader at the GSE for undergraduate student teachers. Lissa served as Breakthrough’s Board Chair from 2001 to 2016.

Gil Noam, Ed.D., Dr. Habil is the founder and director of The PEAR Institute: Partnerships in Education and Resilience at McLean Hospital, a Harvard Medical School affiliate. He is an associate professor at Harvard Medical School focusing on prevention and resilience. He served as the director of the Risk and Prevention Program and is the founder of the RALLY Prevention Program, a Boston-based intervention that bridges social and academic support in school, afterschool, and community settings.

He has published over 200 papers, articles, and books in the areas of child and adolescent development as well as risk and resiliency in clinical, school, and afterschool settings. He also served as the editor-in-chief of the journal New Directions for Youth Development: Theory, Practice and Research with a strong focus on out-of-school time. Dr. Noam is trained as a clinical and developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst in both Europe and the United States.

Adam Tucker, deputy director on the K-12 Education team, supports the foundation’s place-based delivery strategy which seeks to test, codify, and scale school improvement models that significantly increase the number of black, Latino, and low-income students who earn a high school diploma, enroll in a post-secondary institution, and are on track in their first year to obtain a credential with labor market value.Prior to joining the foundation, Adam led the communications & advocacy division of Edison Schools. Before Edison, he served as a vice president of LearnNow, another education management organization.

In his current role at the foundation, Adam also draws upon his experience with the Coalition of Essential Schools where he led its school partnerships, public engagement, and advocacy program, and Children Now, a nationally recognized children’s advocacy group. He started his education career as a high school history teacher and program administrator in New England. Adam is a graduate of Brown University.