Douglas Fuchs

Professor of Special Education and Nicholas Hobbs Chair of Special Education and Human Development and Professor Pediatrics in the Vanderbilt University Medical School, Department of Special Education

Douglas Fuchs is an Institute Fellow at the American Institutes for Research and a Research Professor in the Departments of Special Education and Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt University. He is the inaugural holder of the Nicholas Hobbs Chair of Special Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt. He has been a first-grade teacher in a private school for children with behavior problems, fourth-grade classroom teacher in a public school, and school psychologist. He has directed 50 federal research grants with which he and colleagues have developed approaches to service delivery (e.g., pre-referral intervention, response-to-intervention); assessments (e.g., measures of student progress monitoring, dynamic assessment); and instruction (e.g., peer-mediated learning strategies). He is the author or co-author of more than 500 articles in peer-review journals and 80 book chapters. He was identified by Thomson Reuters as among the 250 most frequently cited researchers in the social sciences in the United States from 2000-2010. In 2008, he was among “100 Distinguished Alumni” in the first 100 years of the College of Education and Human Development of the University of Minnesota. In 2014, he and Lynn Fuchs received the American Educational Research Association’s Distinguished Contributions to Research in Education Award, the purpose of which “is to publicize, motivate, encourage, and suggest models for educational research at its best.” In 2021, he and Lynn Fuchs were awarded the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education to “celebrate innovation, inspiration, and impact in education by recognizing outstanding leaders who have devoted their careers to closing gaps and accelerating educational opportunity to all students.”