| Dr. Sara Harkness is a professor of human development, pediatrics, and public health at the University of Connecticut, where she also serves as director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Health, and Human Development. She earned a B.A. magna cum laude and with high honors in Comparative Literature from Brown University, and a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Harvard University; subsequently, she was an NIMH post-doctoral fellow in psychology at Harvard, and earned a Master of Public Health degree from the Harvard School of Public Health. Her research focuses on how the culturally structured environments of children and families, in interaction with biological factors, shape children’s health and development; major projects include a three-year study of child development and family life in a rural Kipsigis community of Kenya, an international collaborative study of parents, children and schools in seven Western countries, and a study of parenting and the development of self-regulation and reactivity among infants in four countries. She has been editor of Ethos (the journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology) and is on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Behavioral Development and Child Studies in Diverse Contexts, as well as being editor of the Temperament Newsletter. In 2009, she received (jointly with Charles Super) an award from the Society for Research in Child Development for Distinguished Contributions to Cultural and Contextual Factors in Child Development. In addition to her cross-cultural research, she has also been involved with intervention programs to help disadvantaged families and youth in Connecticut, and has served on review panels for NICHD, the Maternal and Child Health Bureau, and the Agency for Health Research and Quality. |
