Martha J. Cox, Ph.D.

Martha J. Cox, Ph.D.

Martha J. Cox, Ph.D., is Director of the Center for Developmental Science and Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Cox is known for her studies of families and young children and for her methodological contributions to the observational analysis of family interactions. Since the 1980s, she has studied the early years of family development and the processes of reorganization of families over the transition to parenthood and the transition to school with a special emphasis on the role of family relationships, including parent-child and marital relationships in children's successful adaptation to new challenges in the early years.

She is 1 of 10 principal investigators in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care, a study of children from birth through the elementary school years. She is Principal Investigator of the National Science Foundation-funded North Carolina Child Development Research Collaborative (CDRC). A centerpiece of the CDRC activities is a longitudinal, collaborative, multidisciplinary research study focusing on multiple levels of factors associated with successful development of a diverse group of young children. Dr. Cox is also the Co-principal Investigator of the program project Rural Children Living in Poverty, funded primarily by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development but also by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The purpose of this program project is to understand the early school readiness of an understudied but important group of children: impoverished children living in low-resource, rural areas of the country.