Jay Belsky - Biography#

Jay Belsky is Director of the Institute for the Study of Children, Families and Social Issues and Professor of Psychology at Birkbeck College, University of London. Professor Belsky is an internationally recognized expert in the field of child development and family studies. His areas of special expertise include the effects of day care, parent-child relations during the infancy and early childhood years, the transition to parenthood, the etiology of child maltreatment, and the evolutionary basis of parent and child functioning. He is the author of more than 200 scientific articles and chapters and the author of several books, including The transition to parenthood: How a first child changes a marriage (Delacourt, 1994).

After earning a B.A. degree in psychology at Vassar College (1974), an M.S. degree in Child Development at Cornell University (1976), and a Ph.D. in Human Development and Family Studies (1978), also at Cornell, Jay Belsky served on the faculty of Penn State University in the U.S. for 21 years. In 1996, the President of Penn State University made Professor Belsky a Distinguished Professor. In 1999, Professor Belsky was appointed to a Chair of Psychology at Birkbeck College, University of London and in 2000 became founding director of the Institute for the Study of Children, Families, and Social Issues.

Dr. Belsky has carried out several longitudinal studies focused upon the early years of the family life cycle, concentrating first on the first year of life and especially the interrelation of marriage, parenting and infant development, as well as the effects of day care and origins of attachment security, before moving on to carry out work on the so-called "terrible twos", the second and third years of life. Among other things, he is currently involved in a multi-million dollar, multisite investigation in the U.S. of the effects of early child care on children's development through the age of 11 (The NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development) and a long-standing longitudinal study of 1,000 (currently) young adults in New Zealand who have been studied intensively since age 3. His research as part of the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Project focuses upon the intergenerational transmission of parenting and upon intergenerational relations in adulthood. In 2000, Professor Belsky led a multi-disciplinary team that won a 6-year, £16.9 million award to carry out the National Evaluation of Sure Start in England. He serves as Research Director on that project.

Dr. Belsky's work is marked by a focus upon fathers as well as mothers, marriages as well as parent-child relations, and naturalistic home observations of family interaction patterns. Dr. Belsky's work has been funded, in the U.S. by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the March of Dimes Foundation and the Sara Scaife Family Foundation. In the U.K., he has received funding from The Welcome Trust and the Sure Start Unit of the national government. He has served as a consultant to Vice President Gore on the issue of work and families and attended the White House Conference on Child Care. He has been invited to present his research in many parts of the world, including Japan, Israel, South Korea, England, Ireland, Portugal, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland and Russia.