Jessica Goldberg, PhD, is in the early childhood research area at Child Trends, a research associate professor at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University, and the co-director of Tufts Interdisciplinary Evaluation Research (TIER). Jess’s background is in child and family policy analysis, applied child development, and program evaluation, with a focus on home visiting and other family support programs, place-based initiatives, and systems-building projects. Jess is particularly interested in mixed methods research that generates a deeper understanding of the community and policy contexts in which programs operate, and the processes by which policy priorities and program objectives are realized, challenged, and subverted during the day-to-day interactions between frontline program staff and families. Jess has more than 20 years of experience conducting evaluations of public health and family support programs, and is a co-founder of TIER’s Community Evaluator Model, a community-based participatory research approach TIER uses to ensure that those who are most directly impacted by public health programs and policies play an active role in shaping both the evaluation process and the public health responses.

Jess has deep expertise in home visiting research—particularly research on Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) programs and policies. She has been a principal investigator on all state-led evaluations of MIECHV in Massachusetts (MA MIECHV) and currently leads the state’s MIECHV Coordinated State Evaluation and evaluation of the MIECHV Data Innovation Award. At Child Trends, Jess served as co-principal investigator for Measuring Implementation Quality in MIECHV-Funded Evidence-Based Home Visiting Programs (MIECHV IQ), and currently serves as senior advisor and task lead on Home Visiting Assessments of Implementation Quality (HV-AIM), task lead for the community researcher component of the MIECHV COVID Health Equity project, and senior advisor for the evaluation of Boston’s Healthy Start Initiative. Earlier in her career, Jess worked with families and young children as a child care and elementary school teacher.