Marilyn Holt is a historian of American orphanages and an expert on the history of American Indian adoption. She wrote Indian Orphanages and The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America.

Karen Dubinsky is a professor of history of gender and sexuality, history of tourism, transnational/transracial adoption 
and the global politics of childhood at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

Karen Balcom is an assistant professor of history and women’s studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. She is an expert on historical aspects of adoption up to the 1960s, including the history of social welfare policy in the U.S. and Canada and women’s reform networks. She wrote “‘Phony Mothers’ and Border-Crossing Adoptions: The […]

Linda S. Spears is the vice president of the Child Welfare League of America. She has been a social worker, manager and agency head and is a former director of field support for the Massachusetts Department of Social Services. An enrolled member of the Narragansett Indian Tribe, she is expert on issues of Indian child […]

Adam Pertman is the executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute in New York City. He wrote Adoption Nation: How the Adoption Revolution is Transforming America.

Marianne Novy is a professor of English and women’s studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She wrote Reading Adoption: Family and Differences in Fiction and Drama, a book about adoption themes in literature.

Ellen Herman is a professor of contemporary American history at the University of Oregon and the creator of the Adoption History Project. She is the author of Kinship by Design: A History of Adoption in the Modern United States, which examines the history of modern adoption.

David Brodzinsky is a research and project director at the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute in Oakland, Calif. He is an expert on the psychology of adoption in children, adoption research, interracial adoption, adoption outcomes, foster care, stress and coping in children, developmental psychopathology and divorce and child custody issues. He co-edited The Psychology of […]

Sarah-Vaughan Brakman is associate professor of philosophy at Villanova University in Villanova, Pa., where she served as founding director of the Ethics Program from 1999-2004. She co-edited The Ethics of Embryo Adoption and the Catholic Tradition: Moral Arguments, Economic Reality and Social Analysis.