The Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development's Doctoral Program offers small class sizes; a personalized path of study; mentorship from professors at the top of their fields; collaborative, cross-discipline research opportunities; exclusive internship opportunities; and a learning framework that emphasizes research, practice, and integration. As a student in this program, you will gain the foundational skills and knowledge to make an impact in the lives of children and their families.
PhD candidates in the Child Studies and Human Development Department work closely with a primary mentor and are supported by a community of scholars in various ways. Through a rigorous combination of research, training, coursework, and internships, students develop substantive expertise in one area of scholarship. In addition, they develop competencies in ten other areas, including foundational knowledge of the field, methods and statistics, research, professionalism, grantsmanship, publication, applied work, dissemination, cultural processes, teaching, and mentoring.
The doctoral program in Child Study and Human Development prepares students to make important contributions to theory, research, policy, and practice in diverse settings. Alumni of Eliot-Pearson's doctoral program have gone on to work in a variety of settings, including:
The Child Study and Human Development's admissions process looks at each student as an individual, and reviews applications for strengths and indications that the applicant will be successful in the program.
Final admissions decisions are based on whether a student's interests are a match for one of the faculty who has decided to admit a student for the upcoming year. Prior to applying, you should research the department's faculty members as well as the various departmental labs, research areas, and research projects to ensure the Child Student and Human Development PhD aligns with your interest areas and goals. Please note that the only faculty members who can supervisor doctoral students are Assistant Professors, Associate Professors, or Professors. Other faculty (including Full-Time Lecturers, Senior Lecturers, Research Assistant Professors, Research Associate Professors, Affiliated Faculty) are not able to supervise doctoral students.
See Tuition and Financial Aid information for GSAS Programs.
Average Salary: $70K - $110K
Average Age: 28
*Sources: GSAS-SOE Graduate Exit Survey 2020 - 2021 and Academic Analytics (Alumni Insights)
Research/Areas of Interest: 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
Research/Areas of Interest: child development; research practice partnerships; prosocial development; children's caregiving for family; school policies educational success
Research/Areas of Interest: Neurodevelopmental disorders; autism spectrum disorder; sexuality education; social perception; eye tracking; dimensional measurement of psychological symptoms
Research/Areas of Interest: Children and media; ethnicity/gender and media; adolescents and media use; women's history and biography 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 GBH, 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 serve as co-PI, along with Jennifer Burton, of the Half the History Project at Tufts, which utilizes short-form biography, film, and podcast to tell the untold and under-told stories of women's lives. 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. After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America's Greatest Poet was published by WW Norton in 2018. My next dual biography, Crossing Indian Country: From the Wounded Knee Massacre to the Unlikely Marriage of OhÃye'Sa, Charles Alexander Eastman, will be published by NYU Press in Fall 2025.
Research/Areas of Interest: Developmental risk and resilience; child maltreatment; parent-child emotional availability and attachment relationships; maternal depression; adolescent parenting; relational and contextual supports for thriving
Research/Areas of Interest: Linguistics; literacy, sociolinguistic development; dyslexia in African-American children; language of children's cartoons; children's name-calling
Research/Areas of Interest: Adolescence and young adulthood; identity development; personality development; narrative identity; quantitative methods (including structural equation models)
Research/Areas of Interest: 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
Research/Areas of Interest: Neighborhood and community context; housing context; family context; poverty and socioeconomic status; social policy; adolescence; immigrant young children
Research/Areas of Interest: 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.
Research/Areas of Interest: 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
Research/Areas of Interest: 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.
Research/Areas of Interest: 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
Research/Areas of Interest: 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.
Research/Areas of Interest: 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.
Research/Areas of Interest: 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.