Diane Paulsell
Senior Researcher; Associate Director

Diane Paulsell is a senior researcher and associate director of the human services research division. She studies the effects of early childhood education, home visiting, parenting programs, and policy on low-income families with young children. Her areas of expertise include early childhood home visiting, home-based child care, early childhood systems, and measurement of program implementation and quality.

Paulsell has both national and international experience on studies of early childhood programs. She directs the Home Visiting Evidence of Effectiveness Review, a systematic review of the research literature on early childhood home visiting. For Supporting Evidence-Based Home Visiting to Prevent Child Maltreatment, she leads a study of systems change in 17 grantee sites. She also directed the Early Learning Initiative evaluation, a multifaceted study of community-wide early childhood interventions. In the area of child care, Paulsell directed Support Quality in Home-Based Child Care, a study designed to identify promising strategies for improving quality in home-based settings. She also serves as the senior adviser of the Early Head Start for Family Child Care Project Evaluation. She has played leading roles in several studies of Head Start and Early Head Start.

Internationally, she is a senior researcher for the Disadvantaged Children & Youth Program, which provides support to the governments of Ireland and Northern Ireland to improve services for disadvantaged children and youth. As senior researcher for the Evaluation of the UNICF-Government of Netherlands Cooperation Programme on Early Childhood Development, she contributed to an evaluation of policies and services for children in African and Asia. Before joining Mathematica in 1996, she served as the assistant director for special programs at the Office of Migration and Refugee Service of the U.S. Catholic Conference. She has worked in the field on child welfare and refugee issues in California, Chile, El Salvador, and Texas.

Paulsell has published articles on early childhood development topics in publications such as Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Journal of Infant Mental Health, and Zero to Three and presented her work to a range of policy, research, and practitioner audiences. She holds an M.P.A. in public policy from the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service at New York University.

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