Dr. Douglas E. Wood
Dr. Douglas E. Wood is Director of the Aspen Institute’s Criminal Justice Reform Initiative.
From 2011-2018, he was a program officer at the Ford Foundation on the Youth Opportunity and
Learning team and for nearly two years served as Acting Lead of the foundation’s global Higher
Education for Social Justice initiative, managing grants in the U.S., Colombia, Peru, Chile,
Southern Africa, Egypt and China. He also funded a myriad of programmatic grants focused on
criminal justice reform at the national, state and local levels including investigative journalism,
theater and documentary film.
Prior to joining Ford, he was Executive Director and Chief Education Officer of the Tennessee
State Board of Education, chair of the Basic Education Program Review Committee that
oversees Tennessee’s $3.2 billion K-12 budget, a member of the Tennessee Higher Education
Commission, a gubernatorial appointee to the Education Commission of the States, a Fellow at
the Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University, executive director
and principal investigator of the National Academy for Excellent Teaching, Teachers College,
Columbia University, and Associate Dean at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New
School.
Dr. Wood began his career as a public-school teacher and while a graduate student at Harvard,
worked as a consultant with the Urban Superintendent’s Program, the World Bank’s Office of
East Asian Affairs, and taught at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Dr. Wood received
the 2018 Alumni Council Award for Outstanding Contributions to Education from the Harvard
Graduate School of Education and is Board Chair of the Partnership for College Completion. Dr.
Wood holds a B.A. degree in History from Wofford College, a master’s degree in English from
Middlebury College, and a master’s and doctoral degree from Harvard University. He is a
member of Phi Beta Kappa and holds the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from Middlebury
College.