Dana Charles McCoy

Dana Charles McCoy is the Marie and Max Kargman Associate Professor in Human Development and Urban Education Advancement at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research focuses on documenting and supporting young children's development in low- and middle-income countries. McCoy has a particular interest in developing ecologically valid measures of early childhood development, and then using these measures to understand the specific home, school, and community factors that shape children's outcomes in diverse global settings. She has also supported the implementation and evaluation of numerous early childhood interventions designed to improve young children's social-emotional and learning outcomes. Across these efforts, McCoy collaborates closely with international partners — including UNICEF, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and national governments — to ensure that research is translated into more effective and contextually grounded programs and policies for young children and their families.

Before joining the HGSE faculty, McCoy served as an NICHD National Research Service Award post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard Center on the Developing Child. She graduated with an A.B. in psychological and brain sciences from Dartmouth College and received her Ph.D. in applied psychology with a concentration in quantitative analysis from New York University. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Institute of Education Sciences, the National Institutes of Health, the Jacobs Foundation, and the Lemann Foundation, amongst others. She has also published her work in a variety of interdisciplinary journals, including Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Pediatrics, and The Lancet.