Christine M. McWayne, Ph.D.

Christine M. McWayne, Ph.D.

Christine M. McWayne, Professor, in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University, is an applied developmental psychologist and a community-based educational researcher whose work has centered on fostering better understandings of the early social and learning successes of young children growing up in urban poverty, as well as on understanding how to better support and connect the adult contributors to children's early development—their parents and teachers.

Underpinning her research with these adults are attempts to "flip the script," so to speak, and create the space for practitioners and family members supporting children's development to tell us what they know, what they do, and how they do it, so that their experiential knowledge can inform our scientific knowledge base. Dr. McWayne has served as Principal Investigator (PI) on several grants, including from the National Institutes of Health, the Administration for Children and Families within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the National Science Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, and the Brady Education Foundation. She has served as a consultant on numerous local, state, and federal working groups and expert convenings on topics such as: dual language learners' school readiness, assessment, family engagement, parenting, and Head Start programming. Dr. McWayne has also served on the editorial boards of Early Childhood Research Quarterly, the National Head Start Association’s Dialog, and as Associate Editor for the Educational Researcher, Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, and Journal of School Psychology. She received her Ph.D. in School, Community and Clinical-Child Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania.