School of Arts and Sciences
Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study & Human Development

Faculty

Faculty

Core Faculty

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Tama Leventhal

Professor and Department Chair of Child Study & Human Development
Neighborhood and community context; housing context; family context; poverty and socioeconomic status; social policy; adolescence; immigrant young children
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Emma Armstrong-Carter

Assistant Professor
child development; research practice partnerships; prosocial development; children's caregiving for family; school policies educational success
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Mary Buckingham

Research Assistant Professor
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Kathleen Camara

Research Associate Professor
Arts, music and drama education and its impact on youth development in formal and informal settings; the development of arts programming to support positive development, cultural identity and resilience among youths in underserved communities; arts and social justice; family influences on children's learning and social development; quantitative and qualitative methods of research and mixed methods designs; program evaluation
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Mary Casey

Senior Lecturer
Parent-child relations
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Eileen Crehan

Assistant Professor
Neurodevelopmental disorders; autism spectrum disorder; sexuality education; social perception; eye tracking; dimensional measurement of psychological symptoms
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Julie Dobrow

Senior Lecturer
Children and media; ethnicity/gender and media; adolescents and media use. I am currently working on a three-tiered interdisciplinary research project along with Chip Gidney, Mary Casey, and Cynthia Smith at Eliot-Pearson, as well as faculty in several other departments at Tufts. The first piece of this project is a long-running content analysis of children's animated programming. We are updating prior work we've done that investigates images of race, ethnicity and gender in children's animated programming using both content and sociolinguistic analysis. The second part of this research is an exploration of why stereotyping persists in children's media. We are examining this through intensive interviews with content creators, writers, directors, vocal casting directors, and actors. The third part of the project is empirical research we're conducting with children, to see how children make sense of gender, race, and ethnicity in the animated programs they see. My applied work includes doing many media literacy workshops for parents and for children and for children in a variety of settings, and consulting work with colleagues at WGBH, one of the leading creators of children's educational media. I have written about children and media issues in a variety of academic and popular venues. My other research is historical in nature. I've written one biography of the relatively unknown mother/daughter team who made Emily Dickinson into one of the most-known women anywhere in the world, and am starting work on a couple of other biographical projects.
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Elizabeth Dowling

Research Professor
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M. Ann Easterbrooks

Professor
Developmental risk and resilience; child maltreatment; parent-child emotional availability and attachment relationships; maternal depression; adolescent parenting; relational and contextual supports for thriving
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Rebecca Fauth

Research Associate Professor
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Calvin Gidney

Associate Professor
Linguistics; literacy, sociolinguistic development; dyslexia in African-American children; language of children's cartoons; children's name-calling
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Jessica Goldberg

Research Associate Professor
Child and family policy; program evaluation; home visiting and other family support programs
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Sara Johnson

Associate Professor
Adolescence and young adulthood; identity development; civic development and engagement; youth contribution; critical consciousness; quantitative methods (including mixture models such as latent class and latent profile analyses); positive youth development
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Theo Klimstra

Senior Lecturer
Adolescence and young adulthood; identity development; personality development; narrative identity; quantitative methods (including structural equation models)
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Richard Lerner

Professor and Bergstrom Chair in Applied Developmental Science
The application of developmental science across the life span; developmental systems theory; personality and social development in adolescence; developmental methodology; programs and policies for children, youth, and families; university-community collaboration and outreach scholarship. Developmental Science
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Christine McWayne

Professor
Early childhood education, school success of young children at risk due to poverty, parenting and family-school partnerships in diverse ethnocultural communities, culturally inclusive STEM curriculum, community-based research collaborations.
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Jayanthi Mistry

Professor
Theoretical perspectives on the integration of culture and human development; Narratives of identity and place in communities; Navigating multiple cultural worlds, with a focus on ethnic minority, immigrant, and under-represented communities; Interpretive and Narrative Analysis methods in the study of children and families.
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Kerri Modry-Mandell

Senior Lecturer
Pediatric psychology; Developmental Psychopathology; Family Functioning and Adaptation to Pediatric Chronic Illness; Children's Sibling Relationships; Psychological Consultation and Collaboration and Therapeutic Space Design; Grief Support; Pediatric Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Developmental Initiatives
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Ellen Pinderhughes

Professor
Families and children in challenging circumstances; parenting and family functioning among diverse families; ethnic-racial socialization processes; cultural and contextual influences; child and youth outcomes; adoption and foster care
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Martha Pott

Distinguished Senior Lecturer
Personal and social development; biological & evolutionary roots of human development Biological and evolutionary substrates of human development; the role of eye-contact in social development.
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Fernando Salinas-Quiroz

Assistant Professor
I approach my research through a lens of reflexivity, with an understanding that my own experiences and positions in the world have shaped the focus of my work. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that as the effeminate child of a single mother, raised by a network of powerful women, with aspirations to raise children and in daycare throughout childhood, I was driven to study clinical and developmental psychology, as well as to deepen my studies of gender. I've always been fascinated by children and the relationships they co-construct with adults. For eight years I mostly focused on studying those raised outside of the context of a "traditional" family using (developmental) psychology lenses. My previous research projects demystified and reimagined Attachment Theory. We assessed the quality of Mexican public daycare settings -becoming the first study in Latin America that used the q-sort methodology to describe professional secondary caregiver-child interactions-; described parental sensitivity and attachment security in lesbian and gay parented families -an avant-garde project in testing the universality and the sensitivity hypothesis with other than heterosexual parents-, and centered the experiences of Black and Brown scholars to push the attachment field toward anti-racism. I lead a research team that analyzed the pedagogical function of legal protections of LGB individuals for promoting social changes, specifically the role of contact and comfort in shaping attitudes toward same-sex parenting in 15 countries. I also lead another group that examined parenting aspiration among folks with diverse sexual orientations and gender identities, and its association with internalized homo/transnegativity and community connectedness to the LGBTQ community -the first world-wide study including trans and plurisexual participants-. In Fall 2021, I joined the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University as an Assistant Professor. I dedicated my first months in the U.S. to wrap up ongoing projects in Latin America. In 2022, Dr. Ellen Pinderhughes asked me to conduct further analysis on their pioneering "Gay Fathers" dataset and lead an article. I decided to focus on Latinx gay fathers' pathways to parenthood, social stigma, helpfulness of social relationships and comfort being out (manuscript in progress). Now I had the resources to book an eye examination and renew my prescription. It turns out that my near vision ([developmental] psychology) was okay but I needed to correct my farsightedness. Since my times in my beloved Mexico City, I've been thinking that psychology is often a frustratingly narrow discipline which tends to privatize, individualize, and depoliticize the phenomena it studies (Kitzinger, 1995). Don't get me wrong, is not that we don't have top Optometrists in the Majority World, but now I had the privilege to be covered by an elite health insurance that allows me to choose a provider. Via by my Faculty Research Funds, and the Summer Scholars Program 2022, Office of the Provost, I led the project "How Do Children Identifying Beyond the Gender Binary and Their Parents Understand Gender?" To the best of my knowledge, no research team had directly asked 5-8 y/o non-binary (enby) children about what being enby means to them (i.e., a child-centered approach which prioritizes their experiences over adult–centric narratives). When recruiting for the aforementioned project, I learned about Trans formative Schools (TfS) and my life transformed. TfS is a new, progressive education initiative centering transness and social justice. We are a community of students, educators, and families whose collective mission is to support trans futures. To trans is a way of seeing and knowing; an epistemological position to produce dissident forms of knowledge (i.e., brand new prescription lenses). Our mission of transing education embodies the work of liberation through rigorous academics, joyful connections, identity exploration, and progressive practice. TfS seeks to move toward societal systemic change, equipping our students with the scaffolding to challenge racist, ableist, transphobic, transmisogynistic, and other white supremacist systems of oppression. TfS co-founder Alaina Daniels and I co-constructed a longitudinal research proposal to facilitate trans-led ways of building, identifying, and testing evidence in order to trans education by centering and uplifting trans people in the design, execution, and application of research as the practice of education is fundamentally a relational one. We will apply a Youth Participatory Action Research-mixed-methods approach to explore how a middle school, designed toward subverting the cis-supremacist systems that govern educational practice, impacts the belongingness, health, wellness, and learning outcomes of trans students and communities. Through this condensed overview of my past, present, and future as a researcher I intend to illustrate not only how my vision has changed and will keep changing, but my commitment to investigate how historical and contemporary structural inequalities disproportionately shape outcomes for marginalized folks, families, communities, and institutions that serve them.
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W. George Scarlett

Distinguished Senior Lecturer
Children's development as earth stewards, children's play, Approaches to children's challenging behaviors, religious and spiritual development across the lifespan, the arts in support of children's development.
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Jonathan Tirrell

Research Associate Professor
I am a developmental scientist and Research Associate Professor at Tufts University in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development. With the Institute for Applied Research in Youth Development (IARYD), I study positive youth development (PYD), seeking to understand what goes "right" in the lives of youth, by engaging in researcher-practitioner partnerships with youth-serving organizations around the world (currently Rwanda, Uganda, South Africa, and El Salvador). My research is broadly focused on character development--I am interested in how people become good people. With a focus on person-context relations across development, I also explore how good people shape, and are shaped by, good communities and cultures. Specifically, my work has focused on the potential role of forgiveness as a character strength and civic virtue. This interest has steered me toward working with individuals and organizations interested in peacebuilding and restorative justice, for instance, in Rwanda as well as the Boston area. Lessons learned from this work are timely and important for civil society and human flourishing, perhaps especially in an era of increasingly polarized social and political climates. Forgiveness, restorative justice, and peacebuilding seem to be linked by common threads of empathy, curiosity, generosity, listening, and dialogue, as well as critical thinking, personal responsibility, community action, and civic engagement. Please find my CV in LinkedIn for more information on my professional experiences, research grants, editorial and consulting activities, teaching experience, and publications.

Affiliate Faculty

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Marina Bers

Affiliate
learning technologies
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Renata Celichowska

Senior Lecturer
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Lisa Fiore

Program Director, Post-Bac Programs
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Laurie Miller

Adjunct Professor
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Diane Ryan

Associate Dean for Programs and Administration

Part-time Faculty

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Louise Applegate

Lecturer
American Sign Language
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Jessica Bartlett

Lecturer
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Mariah Contreras

Lecturer
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Virginia Diez

Lecturer
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Leandra Elion

Lecturer
Children with special needs
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Crystal Eusebio

Lecturer
American Sign Language
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Shelley Isaacson

Lecturer
Children's Literature
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James Lipsky

Lecturer
American Sign Language; deaf studies
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Melinda Macht-Greenberg

Lecturer
Assessment
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Jennifer O'brien

Lecturer
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Karen O'hicks

Lecturer
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Kristina Schmid Callina

Lecturer
Applied Regression Analysis for Developmental Science
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Karen Shmukler

Lecturer
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Cynthia Smith

Lecturer
Child art; art therapy; curriculum development; teacher education; community arts; children/young adult literature; interdisciplinary literacy

Emeriti Faculty

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David Elkind

Professor Emeritus
Cognitive development; perceptual development; Piaget
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David Feldman

Professor Emeritus
Cognitive development; developmental theory; creativity; intellectual development; developmental transitions; expertise; extreme giftedness and creativity; educational and developmental theory.
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Francine Jacobs

Associate Professor Emerita
Child and family policy program evaluation
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Donald Wertlieb

Professor Emeritus
Clinical aspects of family and child development; pediatric and health psychology; stress and coping