Jay Belsky Ph.D.

Jay Belsky, Ph.D., is the Robert M. and Natalie Reid Dorn Professor of Human Development at the University of California, Davis. He was a founding investigator of the NIH Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development in the United States and the National Evaluation of Sure Start in the United Kingdom.

Professor Belsky is an internationally recognized expert in the field of child development and family studies. His areas of expertise include the effects of day care, parent-child relations during the infancy and early childhood years (including attachment), the transition to parenthood, the etiology of child maltreatment and the evolutionary basis of parent and child functioning. Dr. Belsky's research 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. He is a founding and collaborating investigator on the NICHD Study of Child Care and Youth Development (US) and that National Evaluation of Sure Start (UK). He is the author of more than 300 scientific articles and chapters and the author/editor of several books, including The National Evaluation of Sure Start: Does Area-Based Early Intervention Work (The Policy Press, 2007).

Prof. Belsky obtained his Ph.D. in 1978 in Human Development and Family Studies from Cornell University and, before moving to London in 1999, served on the faculty at Penn State University for 21 years, rising to the rank of Distinguished Professor of Human Development. In 2002 the Institute of Scientific Information, Philadelphia, PA granted Professor Belsky the Highly-Cited-Researcher designation. In 2007 he was awarded the American Psychological Association Urie Bronfenbrenner Award for Lifetime Contribution to Developmental Psychology in the Service of Science and Society.