Doré R. LaForett is a research scholar in the early childhood development program area at Child Trends. Her work examines practices, programs, and policies that affect young children and families, particularly in the areas of early learning and development, well-being and mental health, and family functioning. Dr. LaForett is committed to advancing the well-being of children and families through ecologically valid and developmentally focused research, clinical work, and service to the field and broader community.

For over 20 years, much of Dr. LaForett’s work has focused on state and federal early care and education programs and systems. She is the principal investigator (PI) for the first process evaluation of the Colorado Universal Preschool Program. She also works on evaluations of North Carolina’s Preschool Development Grant Birth through Five, Georgia’s implementation of the Pyramid Model framework of practices to promote young children’s social and emotional development, and Minnesota’s efforts related to early childhood mental health consultation. In addition, Dr. LaForett has a long history of conducting research in Head Start settings, including descriptive studies, intervention development and testing, and secondary data analysis of national datasets; she has also served as an evaluator on two of Head Start’s national technical assistance centers.

Dr. LaForett also has extensive experience researching Hispanic children and families and children who are multilingual learners. She currently works on the Latino Families Flourishing initiative to conduct a national survey of Latino families; was recently a co-investigator on the National Research Center on Hispanic Children & Families, where she co-led research activities focused on Head Start; and was also recently PI of a study focused on K-3rd grade students in Spanish-English dual language educational settings. In addition, Dr. LaForett has worked on many projects focused on mental health and well-being, including an efficacy study of a school-based adaptation of the Incredible Years, strategic planning and research support for the Conscious Discipline curriculum, state-level evaluation planning of Triple P implementation, measurement of youth well-being, and toolkits and supports to increase parent-child talk for mothers of infants and toddlers enrolled in Early Intervention services and experiencing depression symptoms.

A licensed psychologist, Dr. LaForett has expertise in child assessment and evidence-based practices and has served as an early childhood mental health consultant in Head Start classrooms for over 10 years. She was previously an appointed member of the North Carolina Early Childhood Advisory Council and is currently the past-chair of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) Latinx Caucus. She is an associate editor for the Journal of Early Intervention and is on the Editorial Board for the journal Early Education & Development.