Vonnie C. McLoyd is Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is interested in the impact of economic disadvantage, work-related transitions, and parental job characteristics on family life and child development, the mediators and moderators of these impacts, and the implications of research on these issues for both practice and policy. McLoyd also has a longstanding interest in how race, ethnicity, and culture shape child socialization and development. She is currently PI for an NIMH-funded project that assesses models linking economic hardship to adolescent mental health through various family-level mediators and tests the replicability of these models across five longitudinal samples. She is also one of several investigators assessing the long-term impact on family functioning and child development of New Hope, a work-based anti-poverty program tested in a random assignment experimental design.

Dr. McLoyd's broad research interests concern parental influences on children's socioemotional development and how these influences are conditioned by demographic and contextual factors such as economic poverty, ethnic minority status, and neighborhood and school quality. Her current research tests models of the mechanisms by which economic hardship (e.g., parental job loss, income loss, poverty) affects family relations and socioemotional development in African American adolescents, with special emphasis on parenting, social support, and cognitive factors. Complementing this work is her examination of the processes by which adolescents formulate causal attributions about economic inequality and hardship and how these attributions affect school-related achievement behavior, values, expectations, and mental health. The overarching goal of her work is to enhance understanding of the process that contribute to emotional and social resilience in economically disadvantaged adolescents. Dr. McLoyd has published numerous articles, book chapters, and edited volumes focusing on poverty, economic stress and children's development.

Dr. McLoyd was a William T. Grant Faculty Scholar in Child Mental Health from 1986-1991 and received a MacArthur Award in 1996. Dr. McLoyd also received the 1994 Reuben Hill Research and Theory Award given by the National Council on Family Relations for outstanding work that combines theory and research on important family issues. Between 1992 and 1996, Dr. McLoyd was Associate Editor of Child Development. She currently serves as Director of the Children in Poverty Program at the Center for Human Growth and Development. Dr. McLoyd also is Co-Director of a Fogarty Minority International Research Training Program at the University of Michigan, an initiative that enables minority undergraduate and graduate students to conduct research in South Africa, China, Bolivia, and Chile on issues relevant to child health and development.