Nancy E. Hill
Nancy E. Hill is an American developmental psychologist and the Charles Bigelow Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She studies how parents influence their children's development, especially in adolescence, how culture affects minority youth, and how families shape learning through academic socialization—parents' beliefs, expectations, and actions that support school and career goals.
She is the President of the Society for Research in Child Development (2021–2023) and has served on the National Academies' Board on Children, Youth, and Families. In 2018, she received the Ernest R. Hilgard Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Psychological Association.
Education and career: Hill earned a B.S. in psychology with honors from Ohio State University in 1989, then a M.A. (1992) and Ph.D. (1994) in developmental psychology at Michigan State University under Hiram E. Fitzgerald. Her early work looked at parent-child relationships and social mobility in African American families. She did a postdoctoral fellowship at Arizona State University’s Preventive Intervention Research Center (1994–1996). She taught at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before joining Harvard in 2009. She was a Radcliffe Institute Fellow (2014–2015) and a Distinguished Faculty Fellow of the William T. Grant Foundation (2013–2014).
Funding and research: Her work is supported by the National Science Foundation, Institute of Education Sciences, NICHD, NIMH, and the Spencer Foundation. Her research focuses on parental practices that guide academic development, such as setting expectations, teaching learning strategies, and shaping beliefs about learning.
Key findings: In a 2010 paper with Diana Tyson, Parental involvement in middle school: a meta-analysis of 50 studies with over 50,000 students, they found parental involvement boosts academic and career success, especially through academic socialization—helping students think about future jobs and plan coursework.
Publications and edits: She co-authored The End of Adolescence: The Lost Art of Delaying Adulthood with Alexis Redding. She has co-edited volumes including African American Children and Mental Health; African American Family Life: Ecological and Cultural Diversity; and Families, Schools, and the Adolescent: Connecting Research, Policy, and Practice.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 10:36 (CET).