Samuel J. Meisels

In 2017 the university named Meisels to the Richard D. Holland Presidential Chair in Early Childhood Development, the highest honor the university can confer on a faculty member.

Meisels was appointed the founding Executive Director of the Buffett Early Childhood Institute in June 2013. The Institute was created in order to raise early childhood to a university priority.

In 2010 Meisels received an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from Roosevelt University and in 2019 the Simms/Mann Institute awarded Meisels its Visionary Leadership Award in Development and Education.

During his 21 years at Michigan, Meisels held several positions including that of research scientist and acting director at the Center for Human Growth and Development, and professor, interim dean, and associate dean of research in the School of Education. In 2002 Meisels became the president of Erikson Institute. In June 2013 Meisels was appointed the founding executive director of the Buffett Early Childhood Institute, where he is also a professor of child, youth, and family studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and holds courtesy appointments on the other university campuses as a professor of public health, public administration, and education.

Meisels served as president of Erikson Institute, a graduate school in child development, from 2002-2013. Under Meisels's leadership, Erikson grew into a source of research, community partnerships, and graduate programs, all of which continually evolved to meet the needs of the early childhood field.

In 1975 Meisels and his colleagues began work on a brief developmental screening instrument designed to identify children, aged 3–6, who were at risk for learning and behavior problems. Known as the Early Screening Inventory (ESI-3), this well-researched, nationally validated screening instrument identifies children who can benefit from early intervention services. It is one of the most reliable and carefully developed early childhood screening instruments available and is currently in its third edition.

In 1972 Meisels accepted a position as a faculty member at Tufts University and, from 1973-1978, was director of the Eliot-Pearson Children's School, the laboratory school of the Department of Child Study. From 1979-1980 he served as Senior Advisor in Early Childhood Development in the Developmental Evaluation Clinic of Children's Hospital Medical Center at Boston before joining the faculty of the University of Michigan in the fall of 1980.

Meisels received his bachelor's degree with high honors in philosophy from the University of Rochester in 1967 and then enrolled in a master's and doctoral program at Harvard University in education and philosophy. While at Harvard Meisels began studying the work of Jean Piaget, whose ideas about children and epistemology motivated him to become a teacher of preschool, kindergarten, and first grade. Meisels completed his doctoral studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1973.