Dina Castro

Dina C. Castro, Ph.D., MPH. is Director of the BU Institute for Early Childhood Well-Being. Prior to joining BU, she was Professor and the Velma E. Schmidt Endowed Chair in Early Childhood Education at the University of North Texas (2014-2021). She also held positions at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University (2013-2014), and the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, and the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1997-2013). Her scholarship focuses on equity and quality in the early care and education of bilingual children in immigrant, migrant and indigenous communities. It is conceptualized at the intersection of language, culture, race, ethnicity, and disability, recognizing the need for interdisciplinary approaches across the fields of early childhood development and education, bilingualism and bilingual education, and special education. Nationally, Dr. Castro has developed and examined the efficacy of early childhood professional development interventions to improve language, literacy and socio-emotional development of bilingual children. She has developed measures to assess the quality of early education programs serving bilingual children, and second language acquisition in young children. Dr. Castro served as Director of the Center for Early Care and Education Research: Dual Language Learners, a federally funded national research center focused on increasing our understanding of practices and measurement to improve early care and education for bilingual children. Another area of research interest is children’s health, she studied risk and resilience factors related to birth weight outcomes among Latina immigrant mothers and evaluated community-based interventions to prevent and revert early childhood obesity. Dr. Castro’s research has been funded by the Institute of Education Science, the National Institute of Child Health and Development, the Administration for Children and Families and the Office of Special Education Programs. Her policy and advocacy work includes being past member of the Governing Board of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) and advisor to statewide and local early childhood initiatives in Arizona, California, Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas. In the global context, she is examining teachers’ conceptualizations about interculturality and their classroom practices in intercultural bilingual education schools in the Amazon region of Peru and co-leading a binational study investigating the experiences of transnational students and their teachers in U.S. and Mexican schools. Dr. Castro is a Fulbright Specialist.

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