Welcome to the 2025 IES Principal Investigators (PI) Meeting—our first in-person meeting in five years! The PI Meeting provides a unique occasion to bring together the IES community to learn from other researchers and IES staff about common challenges and opportunities facing the field. We hope that you use this meeting as a place to reconnect with existing colleagues, as well as to build new cross-disciplinary relationships. We have each witnessed, firsthand, the kinds of collaborations and insights that emerge from PI Meetings, especially through the informal connections made during “in-between" times.
The Co-Chairs for this year’s PI Meeting are Wendy Reinke (University of Missouri) and Jeannette Mancilla-Martinez (Vanderbilt University). The theme this year is Navigating New Realities in the Education Sciences: Working Together to Chart a Course. We have also identified three subthemes to further shape the meeting agenda. These include:
- Anchoring Research in Stakeholder Needs
- Strengthening Connections Between Practice, Policy, and Research
- Transformational Technologies and Methods in Education Research
This year’s theme reflects the evolving landscape of education practice, policy, and research and the challenges and opportunities it presents. We hope the conference will provide a venue for us to learn from each other and chart a course for the future of our field. We are firmly committed to fostering collaboration and innovation, with diversity, inclusion, accessibility, and equity as consistent anchors across the conference. These principles are not just central to this year’s meeting but are indispensable to strengthening and shaping our collective work in the education sciences.
Meeting the challenge of these new realities will require investment in the continued growth of current scholars and in rigorous training for the next generation of researchers. We are particularly excited to welcome to the conference our advanced graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and early career researchers. At this pivotal juncture for education research, policy, and practice, we underscore that our approaches must include and reflect the diverse communities that comprise our nation. By working together, we can chart a course that leads to meaningful and lasting impact for all students’ educational opportunities.
During this year’s meeting, we will not only reflect on and celebrate IES’s accomplishments and successes, but we will also explore how IES can further advance the education sciences and improve education outcomes for all learners.
We look forward to seeing you in person in January!
Jeannette Mancilla-Martinez, Co-Chair
Wendy Reinke, Co-Chair
Elizabeth Albro, Commissioner, NCER
Nathan Jones, Commissioner, NCSER