Margaret Beale Spencer

Margaret Beale Spencer, a developmental psychologist, is the Charles L Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emerita, and Marshall Field IV Professor of Urban Education and Professor of Life Course Human Development at the University of Chicago (Comparative Human Development Department) where she also earned her doctorate. Promoting resiliency of highly vulnerable children is her unequivocal life’s mission. Forty-five plus years of scholarship have produced critical insights regarding vulnerability, risk and resilience as normatively experienced by diverse individuals including those considered privileged. Spencer’s Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory (P-VEST) provides an identity, cultural and ecological perspective. Her gender, race/ethnicity, and context-sensitive program of research has been featured by ABC and CNN and globally disseminated. Research findings and PVEST framed scholarship include 150+ publications, numerous grants and awards including the American Psychological Association (2018) Life Time Achievement Award. As the Urban Resiliency Initiative, current efforts emphasize educational contexts, interrogate neighborhood policing encounters, and seek diminished vulnerability and increased global resiliency.