My work explores how family life and parenting are constructed within cultural, social, and historical processes. Much of my research aims to identify how social conditions shape parents’ childrearing beliefs, goals, and actions as well as how parents shape and change the institutions with which they interact. I focus particularly on parents who face extraordinary challenges, including sexism, homophobia, poverty, and racism. I am very interested in learning how parents interact with their children's schools and schooling and in identifying ways that schools can best support the development and achievement of children in diverse families.

Jennifer Skeem is a clinical psychologist and professor in the School of Social Welfare and Goldman School of Public Policy. Her specializations include mental health, criminal behavior and intervention/policy.

Her research is designed to inform clinical and legal decision-making about people with emotional and behavioral problems. Specific topics include identifying factors that improve outcomes for offenders with serious mental illness, understanding psychopathic personality disorder and promoting prosocial behavior among juveniles at high risk for violence. 

Merging her background in developmental psychology and applied linguistics, Laura Sterponi has advanced a research program that is centrally concerned with the role of language and literacy practices in children's development and education. Sterponi is drawn to study language, oral and written, both as a central means of learning and as a critical target of cultural transmission. Her work thus explores the interface between cognition and culture in communicative practices across learning contexts. Sterponi has developed a strand of research on language in childhood autism, which further explores the cognitive and interactional underpinnings of language development.

Christine Su is a Project Manager at the Adolescent Research Collaborative at IHD.  Her background and interests are in global and community health and gender.  She is passionate about working with young people and bringing theory, practice, and policy together to best inform her work. 

Qing Zhou is an Associate Professor in Psychology at University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on understanding how cultural, family, and other contextual factors shape children’s self-regulation, psychopathology, and academic development in ethnic minority and immigrant families in the U.S. and families in Asia. Dr. Zhou’s team is currently working on: a) a longitudinal study on mental health, socio-emotional, and academic development of Chinese American children from immigrant families; b) a study on bilingual and socio-emotional development in preschool-age children from Spanish- and Chinese-speaking homes; and c) a study on teacher influences on children’s emotional competence in preschool/pre-K classrooms.