Child Study and Human Development

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: Parent-child relations

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, Love and Loss After Wounded Knee: A Biography of an Extraordinary Interracial Marriage, will be published by NYU Press in Fall 2025.

Research/Areas of Interest: neurodivergence, autism, social development, experience of higher educations students, participatory research

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: recovery; addiction; substance use; adolescence and emerging adults; community engaged research; recovery high schools; health equity; social contexts

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: 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: 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: 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: 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: My research centers trans and nonbinary children and youth, focusing on how they imagine, inhabit, and transform gender, family, and belonging. I work alongside young people to challenge the rigid binaries that limit their lives, and I see research as a space for co-creation, joy, and justice. Through transdisciplinary approaches, I seek to expand our understanding of change—not as a fixed "path of development," but as the complex, shifting, and plural ways children and communities grow. At the core, my scholarship asks how we can build worlds where trans and queer youth not only exist, but thrive.

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.