Kathleen McCartney (college president)
Kathleen McCartney (born 1956) is the 11th president of Smith College. She was installed as Smiths new president in ceremonies on October 19, 2013. Smith College, located in Northampton, Massachusetts, is a liberal arts college and one of the Seven Sisters colleges. McCartney was born in Medford, M
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Biography

McCartney was born in Medford, Massachusetts, and graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University and earned her master’s and doctoral degrees in psychology from Yale University. She is in the first generation of her family to attend college. She has noted that when she studied at Tufts, male students rated female students on their physical attractiveness with numerical scores, “literally holding up signs” as the women passed by.

McCartney came to Smith from the Harvard Graduate School of Education where she was dean and the Gerald S. Lesser Professor in Early Childhood Development. During her tenure at Harvard, the school introduced a three-year doctorate in educational leadership in collaboration with the Harvard Business School and Kennedy School of Government. Prior teaching and research experience includes service as a tenured associate professor of psychology and family studies as well as director of the Child Study and Development Center at the University of New Hampshire.

Research and academic interests

McCartney’s research has focused on early experience and development, particularly with respect to child care, early childhood education, and poverty. She has published more than 150 articles and book chapters on those topics and was the principal researcher for Child Care and Child Development, a 20-year study published in 2005 that examined whether early and extensive child care disrupted the mother-child relationship. She co-edited Experience and Development, The Blackwell Handbook of Early Childhood Development, and Best Practices in Developmental Research Methods. In 1983, McCartney and Sandra Scarr published a developmental theory of gene-environment correlation.

McCartney is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Psychological Society.

Awards and honors