Hirokazu Yoshikawa

Hiro Yoshikawa is a developmental and community psychologist who conducts research on the development of young children in the U.S., China, and Chile. He focuses on the effects of public policies, particularly those related to parental employment, poverty and early childhood care and education, on children of diverse ethnic and immigrant backgrounds. He is currently working on a cluster-randomized experimental evaluation of Un Buen Comienzo, an initiative in Chile to strengthen children's language, literacy and health by improving the quality of preschool education. He is also conducting a longitudinal study of how parental work experiences are affecting young children's and adolescents' development in the context of economic reforms in Nanjing, China. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City, where he is working on a book on the development of very young children in immigrant families of Chinese, Mexican and Dominican backgrounds. This book will be based on a prospective birth cohort study he has been conducting, with Catherine Tamis-LeMonda, as part of the NSF-funded Center for Research on Culture, Development and Education.

He has served on advisory committees for the National Academy of Sciences and the Department of Health and Human Services. He received early career awards from three divisions of the American Psychological Association (APA), including the Boyd McCandless award for early career contributions to developmental psychology. He also received the ethnic minority mentorship award of Division 27 (the Society for Community Research and Action) of the APA in 2007. He has edited two recent volumes, Making it Work: Low-Wage Employment, Family Life, and Child Development (Russell Sage, 2006, with Thomas S. Weisner and Edward Lowe), Toward Positive Youth Development: Transforming Schools and Community Programs (Oxford, 2008, with Marybeth Shinn), and a recent issue of New Directions in Child and Adolescent Development, entitled Beyond the Family; Social Contexts of Immigrant Children’s Development (2008, with Niobe Way). He is a core faculty member of the Harvard Center on the Developing Child, and a member of the National Forum on Early Childhood Program Evaluation.

Website: Harvard Graduate School of Education