After a career of over 20 years with MU, Wayne Mayfield, PhD, Associate Director of Research at the Institute of Public Policy (IPP), Harry S Truman School of Government and Public Affairs, will be retiring January 1, 2025. After graduating from Grinnell College with a BA in Spanish, he started with MU at the Missouri Testing and Evaluation Services where he worked on the Missouri Mastery and Achievement Tests, the first state-developed school assessments in Missouri. He then began his graduate studies in Counseling Psychology at the University of Iowa, and eventually transferred to MU to complete his master’s and doctoral degrees in Counseling Psychology.
Wayne’s first post-doctoral position was Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology, MU School of Medicine, where he helped train psychiatry residents in counseling and therapy skills. His career took its first turn towards the early childhood field when he moved to the Project Construct National Center, where he helped to revise Project Constructs’ curriculum and assessment framework, assisted in training teachers on how to implement constructivist approaches to learning in the early years, and began developing evidence-based approaches to evaluating the effectiveness of Project Construct.
His first position that was squarely in the policy field was with MU’s Center for Family Policy and Research, where he spent almost a decade working on data-based evaluations and initiatives that informed early childhood policy at the local and state levels, including a federally funded evaluation of Project Construct and development of a Quality Rating System for childcare programs. His early childhood policy work led him to positions with the Thompson Center for Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders as well as the Office of Social of Economic Data Analysis (OSEDA), where he managed the Missouri KIDS COUNT project and other early childhood and youth program evaluations.
During this time, he became the statewide afterschool evaluator for federally funded afterschool program in Missouri. He served as Director of OSEDA for one year before it merged with IPP in 2019, when he became IPP’s Associate Director of Research. During his six-year tenure at IPP, he was Primary Investigator for over a dozen education evaluation and research-related contracts totaling over $4 million, which allowed him to provide financial support and mentor over a dozen graduate students from the Truman School as well as other departments throughout MU. He is enormously grateful to all the colleagues and professionals with whom he has worked from the mental health and education fields over the years in their endeavors to make lives better for all citizens.
We extend our gratitude to Wayne for all of his contributions to MU and the state of Missouri and wish him the very best in his future endeavors.