Ximena Portilla

Portilla is a developmental psychologist with over 20 years of research experience in early childhood development, with a primary focus on the preschool and kindergarten years. She is currently working on the Measures for Early Success Initiative, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which aims to reimagine the landscape of early learning assessments of three- to five-year-olds in pre-K so that more equitable data can be used to meaningfully support and strengthen early learning experiences for all young children. She serves as the content co-lead, supporting a portfolio of interdisciplinary assessment teams who are developing innovative assessments of early language, literacy, mathematics, and executive functions of children from the initiative’s priority populations: Black and Latine children, emergent bilinguals learning Spanish and English, and children experiencing poverty. She has written several briefs for the Educational Equity: Solutions Through Social and Emotional Well-Being project, highlighting district-, educator-, and student-level strategies to build supportive learning environments in public schools that aim to meet all students’ social and emotional needs. She is also the co-lead of MDRC’s Equity Collaborative, which promotes culturally responsive research practices and an equity-based perspective to maximize the benefits of MDRC’s research projects and technical assistance.

Her other body of research at MDRC is on the Mother and Infant Home Visiting Program Evaluation (MIHOPE), a large-scale national evaluation of home visiting programs that intend to prevent child maltreatment and improve maternal and child health, parenting skills, and child development outcomes. She is co-leading the impact evaluation of parenting and child outcomes for the children who participated in MIHOPE at the kindergarten follow-up.

Before her graduate studies, Portilla worked on several projects in MDRC’s early childhood portfolio: Head Start CARES, Foundations of Learning, and two programs in the Enhanced Services for the Hard-to-Employ Demonstration and Evaluation Project: Kansas/Missouri Early Head Start and the Rhode Island Child Add-On. Her research in graduate school focused on early childhood development, social inequality, stress reactivity, and child and maternal executive functioning in both domestic and international settings such as Pakistan and Colombia. Portilla earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from New York University and a PhD in developmental and psychological sciences from Stanford University.