Rachel Dunifon is the Rebecca Q. and James C. Morgan Dean of the College of Human Ecology and Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy. She received a B.A. in Psychology from Davidson College and a Ph.D. in Human Development and Social Policy from Northwestern University. Prior to joining Cornell as a faculty member in 2001 she was the recipient of an NIH-funded postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan.

Dunifon’s research focuses on child and family policy, examining the ways in which policies, programs and family settings influence the development of less-advantaged children. Her recent book, You’ve Always Been There for Me: Understanding the Lives of Grandchildren Raised by Grandparents (2018) draws upon unique multi-method data to understand dynamics in households in which grandparents are raising their grandchildren.

Dunifon is co-director of Project 2GEN, which combines research, policy, and practice to address the needs of vulnerable children and their parents together.  Dunifon and her colleagues were awarded the inaugural William T. Grant Foundation Institutional Challenge Grant for their project titled “Protecting Vulnerable Children and Families in the Crosshairs of the Opioid Epidemic: A Research-Practice Partnership“.

As PI Dunifon has won numerous externally funded research grants, including from the National Institutes of Health, the USDA, and the William T. Grant Foundation. Her work has been published in top journals in developmental psychology (Child Development, Developmental Psychology), public policy (Journal of Policy Analysis and Management), and family demography (Demography, Journal of Marriage and Family).