Dana Charles McCoy is an Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her work focuses on understanding the ways that poverty-related risk factors in children's home, school, and neighborhood environments affect the development of their cognitive and socioemotional skills in early childhood. She is also interested in the development, refinement, and evaluation of early intervention programs designed to promote positive development and resilience in young children, particularly in terms of their self-regulation and executive function. McCoy's work is centered in both domestic and international contexts, including Ghana, Tanzania, Zambia, and Jordan. She has a particular interest in interdisciplinary theory, causal methodology, and ecologically valid measurement. 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, where she studied differential effectiveness of early childhood education programs (e.g., Head Start) across diverse communities in the United States. She graduated with an AB in Psychological and Brain Sciences from Dartmouth College and received her PhD in Applied Psychology from New York University.