Anna Johnson

Co-Director, Child Development & Social Policy Lab (CDSP Lab) and Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor at Georgetown University

About the author:

Developmental psychology and public policy – focusing on early education and food insecurity.

What I want to achieve:

Through the Tulsa SEED study, one of the most comprehensive, ambitious longitudinal studies of low-income children currently collecting data in the U.S., Dr. Johnson’s team aims to continue showing how much pre-k matters for low-income students, how test scores don’t tell the whole story of who kids really are, how subgroups with seemingly insurmountable challenges are doing better than expected after a worldwide pandemic, how essential schools and teachers are for helping vulnerable students and families weather a disaster like COVID. Hopefully, these results will help shape the future of science, public policy, and education.

Awards & accomplishments:

Dr. Johnson’s research has been continually funded by federal and private grants, including from the NICHD and the NIMH (NIH), the Heising-Simons Foundation, the Foundation for Child Development, and the Spencer Foundation, and published in top developmental and education journals. In 2015, Johnson was awarded an Early Career Research Contributions Award from the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) and in 2016 she was the recipient of SRCD’s Victoria S. Levin Award for Early Career Success in Young Children’s Mental Health and an Emerging Scholar of the Self-Sufficiency Research Clearinghouse. In 2017, Dr. Johnson was awarded a Foundation for Child Development Young Scholars award. Most recently, Dr. Johnson was named a Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University.