University of Oregon professors Yong Zhao of the College of Education and Helen Neville of the College of Arts and Sciences have retained their status as highly ranked contributors to public debates about education.

Zhao was ranked ninth and Neville 20th in the 2014 "Edu-Scholar Public Presence Rankings," announced by Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies for the American Enterprise Institute and a blogger for Education Week. This year's rankings included 200 scholars.

Both UO professors first landed on the list in 2013.

"The rankings offer a useful, if imperfect, gauge of the public influence edu-scholars had in 2013," Hess wrote in the announcement. "The rubric reflects both a scholar's body of academic work -- encompassing the breadth and influence of their scholarship -- and their footprint on the public discourse last year."

Zhao joined the UO in January 2011 as the UO's first Presidential Chair. Based in the Department of Educational Methodology, Policy and Leadership, Zhao has traveled internationally to consult with government and educational agencies and to speak on educational issues. His research focuses on improving schools in the context of globalization and the digital revolution.

Neville, a neuroscientist in the Department of Psychology, holds the Robert and Beverly Lewis Endowed Chair at UO. She studies the development and plasticity of the human brain and incorporates what she learns into a variety of educational programs, especially those targeting inequality between lower and higher socioeconomic status.

For detailed information, see the full rankings and a separate description of how scholars were scored.

The 200 ranked scholars were chosen from the more than 20,000 university-based researchers who focus wholly or primarily on educational questions in the U.S. The rankings include the top 150 finishers from last year and 50 at-large additions named by a selection committee of about two dozen accomplished and disciplinarily, intellectually and geographically diverse scholars.

Stanford University had six scholars and Harvard University had four listed in the top 20. New York University, the UO and the University of Virginia were the other institutions to have more than one scholar in the top 20.

—By Jim Barlow, UO Office of Strategic Communications