Thomas E. Allen, Ph.D. has had long and productive career in the field of deaf education research spanning over 30 years. It includes many years of conducting and directing national demographics and assessment projects with large samples of children who are deaf, holding the position of Dean of the Graduate School and Research during a period of expansion of Gallaudet’s Ph.D. programs, and being the Founding Director of the NSF-funded Science of learning Center for Visual Language and Visual Learning (VL2) at Gallaudet University, for which he now serves as the Co-Principal Investigator. He brings to the SIWI project strong abilities in the areas of complex project management, survey design and psychometrics, statistical modeling, and directing collaborative teams of researchers from different disciplines. He led the design and execution of the Early Education Longitudinal Study from within the Gallaudet Early Education and Literacy Lab (EL2), which he directs. EL2 is one of four resource hubs within the VL2 Center. Dr. Allen is currently the Program Director of the interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Educational Neuroscience. He also led in the development of an online portal for ASL Assessment, an online strategy for soliciting research participants providing a means for investigators access to samples, and an online Data Sharing Portal for archiving and sharing federally-funded datasets.