Lauren Supplee

Deputy Assistant Secretary for Planning, Research and Evaluation, Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE)

Lauren Supplee is the deputy assistant secretary for planning, research and evaluation at the Administration for Children and Families (ACF). In this role she serves as the head of ACF’s Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE) as well as ACF’s Chief Evaluation Officer and Scientific Integrity Officer. Prior to leading OPRE, she worked at the William T. Grant Foundation, where she was the senior program officer, leading the foundation’s initiatives on improving the use of research evidence in policy and practice and its institutional challenge grants program.

Previously, Supplee was the deputy chief operating officer and senior scholar in early childhood research at Child Trends, a nonpartisan research center focused on children and their families. While at Child Trends her research focused on evidence-based policy, early childhood home visiting and other parenting programs, prevention science and implementation research. Prior to joining Child Trends, she worked for ten years in OPRE, including four years as the director of the division of family strengthening. During that time, she led research with ACF’s Office of Head Start including the Head Start CARES evaluation, a national evaluation of social-emotional curricula in Head Start classrooms. She also led the initiation and roll-out of the maternal, infant, and early childhood home visiting program, in partnership with the Health Resources and Services Administration, including designing and executing many of the research and evaluation efforts in that program.

She received her Ph.D. in educational psychology with a specialization in family-focused early intervention services from Indiana University.