Tamara Halle, PhD, is a senior research scholar in the early childhood development research area at Child Trends. She has 30 years of experience conducting research and evaluation studies on children’s early development; early care and education settings; and early childhood policies at the national, state, and local levels. Dr. Halle is known both nationally and internationally as an expert on early childhood development, the early childhood workforce, and implementation science. She has worked with multiple states and foundations in support of their early childhood initiatives.

Dr. Halle leads work on several Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) contracts and grants that produce research and policy analysis on early childhood staff, programs, and systems. For example, she co-directs Child Trends’ Child Care and Early Education Policy and Research Analysis (CCEEPRA) contract with OPRE, leading research projects on the early childhood workforce and overseeing secondary analyses of the National Survey of Early Care and Education (NSECE). She also directs an OPRE project examining the feasibility of an innovative quality improvement model for early childhood programs and has led two Child Care Policy Research Partnerships with the state of Maryland examining equitable access to child care in the state.

Dr. Halle has contributed to the design and analysis of several large-scale national surveys, including the NSECE, ECLS-B, ECLS-K, FACES, and NLSY97. Her analyses of the ECLS-B, ECLS-K, and FACES have resulted in scholarly journal articles and research reports on children’s development in early and middle childhood for the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, the National Center for Education Statistics, OPRE, and the Council of Chief State School Officers. Dr. Halle served on the Foundation for Child Development’s Young Scholars Program Advisory Committee for eight years and on the Foundation’s Implementation Research Advisory Committee for four years. She is also a founding member of the Standards Committee for the Global Implementation Society.