Dina Castro

Dina C. Castro, PhD
Director
Boston University Institute for Early Childhood Well-Being

Dr. Dina C. Castro is Director of the Boston University Institute for Early Childhood Well-Being and Professor in the Departments of Teaching and Learning, and Language and Literacy at Wheelock College of Education and Human Development, Boston University. 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, disability, and class, recognizing the need for interdisciplinary approaches across the fields of early childhood development and education, bilingualism and bilingual education, and special education. Dr. Castro has developed and examined the efficacy of professional development interventions to improve the quality of practices in early childhood programs serving bilingual children. She has also developed measures to assess the quality of early education for bilingual children and second language learning 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 a 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.