Jayanthi Mistry, Ph.D. is a Professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University. She earned her doctorate in Child Development from Purdue University. Prior to joining Tufts University, she worked at the Center for the Development of Early Education at Kamehameha Schools in Honolulu, where she was engaged in research and program development projects for early childhood education. Since then, Dr. Mistry has maintained a commitment to developing effective collaborations with practitioners in educational and community-based human service settings. As an applied developmental and cultural psychologist, she brings to RISE an orientation to cultural perspectives on children’s development to examine the diverse realities of the human experience among under-represented communities within the United States and across the world. Dr. Mistry's scholarship is based on investigations of the dynamic nature of developmental transitions in context using person-centered, idiographic, and interpretive methods of analysis. Her publications include chapters on culture and development in the Handbook of Child Psychology and the Handbook of Psychology, as well as both theoretical and empirical papers in Human Development, Child Development, and Journal of Community Psychology, among others. In addition to her work on the RISE project, Dr. Mistry’s recent research projects have included investigations of ethnic and cultural identities among ethnic minority and immigrant youth and narrative analysis of young mothers’ educational and early parenting trajectories.