Dr. Vonnie C. McLoyd is an 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.