Oscar A. Barbarin Profile
Oscar A. Barbarin, is the Lila L and Douglas J. Hertz Professor of Psychology and Director of the School Psychology Program at Tulane University. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Orthopsychiatric Association and has been member of the Governing Council of the Society for Research in Child Development. He chaired the U.S. National committee for the International Union of Psychological Sciences at the National Academy of Sciences, and currently co-edits the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. He received a Ph.D. in Clinical psychology from Rutgers University and held a post-doctoral fellowship in Social Psychology at Stanford University. Before joining the Tulane faculty he was a professor of Psychology and Social Work at the University of Michigan where he also served as the Executive Director of the South Africa Initiative Office.

His research and professional interests center around the interactions of culture, ethnicity and social risks with  child development and mental health. Over the past 30 years his work has focused on the relations among mental health, family life and development of children growing up in poverty. He collaborated on a longitudinal study examining the effects of poverty and violence on child development in South Africa, including publishing a book in 2001, Mandela’s Children: Child development in post-Apartheid South Africa. He directed a longitudinal study of the socio-emotional and academic development of vulnerable boys in the U.S.  He developed ABLE, a universal mental health screener that has been used in the planning of preventive services for school aged children.  He has been active in research on early childhood education. He was a principal investigator on a national study of structural and process quality of early childhood programs and their effects on young children. His body of work on early child work is summarized in his edited volume, The Handbook of Child Development and Early Education. His current projects examine the development of mathematics skills, executive function and their relation to social competence in early childhood.