Oscar A Barbarin, PhD is a Professor of African American Studies and Psychology at the University of Maryland. He earned a PhD in clinical psychology from Rutgers University. He has served on the faculty of the Universities of Michigan and has held Endowed chairs at the University of North Carolina and Tulane University. His scholarly work has sought to illuminate how families, schools, and communities moderate the effects of adversity on the development of  children of color. He served as principal investigator of  a national study on the socio-emotional and academic development of boys of color. His work on children of African descent extends to a 20-year longitudinal study of the effects of poverty and violence on child development in South Africa. He has served as an editor of the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, served on the Governing Council of the Society for Research in Child Development and the executive committee of the International Union of Psychological Sciences, and chaired the US National Committed for Psychology at the National Academy of Sciences.