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Welcome • Bienvenido • أهلا وسهلا
I'm Kiki Eyvonne Ghossainy and I'm glad you're here.
I am a problem solver, planner, and organizer and I do my best work when I am in community with peers, mentees, and other collaborators working strategically, creatively, and efficiently towards shared goals. I aim to inspire creativity and confidence within the teams I work with. Importantly, I am a steward for justice-centered research and proactively work to uphold principles of equity and anti-racism in my methods and my outputs. |
About Me
For more than 10 years, I have contributed to the success and advancement of multiple large-scale projects in psychology, public health, education, and economics. My work helps draw insights about how culture and context shape human behavior and decision making across the lifespan. For example, I have helped non-profit organizations design surveys and develop sampling plans that would allow us to draw data-informed insights about how to support school-aged children who have one or more incarcerated caregiver. In a separate project, I worked with a state agency to process and analyze their data about adolescent substance use and propose initiatives that mitigate risk of further marginalization. I have developed monitoring and evaluation plans to assess effectiveness of different humanitarian projects, including improving economic empowerment of women who live in rural areas and RCT studies of a family focused psychosocial intervention program for refugees and the forcibly displaced.
With my work, I aim to inform real world decisions, especially in service of greater equity and amplifying the voices and experiences of those outside of dominant culture. As a seasoned researcher who has worked in a range of settings nationally and internationally, I am keenly aware of the nuance and detail that goes on behind the scenes in a research project that could impact usability of the findings. With this specialized expertise, you will often find me reflecting on and discussing different ways that researchers can uphold the responsibility to be anti-racist in their research practices throughout the whole process.
In addition to formal, academic outlets for public speaking, including teaching in the classroom and giving conference presentations, I particularly enjoy delivering presentations to broader audiences. I've offered free community-focused workshops on parenting in times of crisis in which I talk with parents about emotional co-regulation and about communicating about existential questions in a way that meets children at their cognitive and emotional skill-level. I also enjoy offering technical skills training, including quantitative methods like Excel and R and survey building in Qualtrics and KoboToolbox.
Currently, I am the Associate Director for the Developing Belief Network, a large scale, multi-site research consortium with over a dozen field sites across the world working with young children and families to learn more about what shapes personal and social development in each context. I am currently affiliated with Boston University and I am a field site leader alongside Dr. Tamer Amin at the American University of Beirut.
In 2016, I completed a Ph.D in Psychology and a M.Sc. in Statistics and Data Science at The University of Texas at Austin.