Parisa Parsafar, Ph.D.

Parisa Parsafar, Ph.D., joined CDBB as a program director in 2024. She joined NICHD in 2020 as a Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) Federal Executive Branch Policy Fellow with DER.  

Prior to joining NIH, Dr. Parsafar completed an SRCD Federal Congressional Policy Fellowship, working in Congress with a diverse range of policymakers, scientific and professional societies, and community and advocacy organizations to advance federal health and education policy.

Dr. Parsafar has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside (UC Riverside) in developmental psychology with an emphasis on emotion-cognition connections across childhood in the context of understanding mental health conditions. Her previous program of research focused on children’s exposure to negative emotional situations and the broader health-related consequences for how they manage them. During her graduate training, she focused on increasing the impact of research and making it more relevant to communities by helping to launch the UC Riverside Science-to-Policy Certificate Program. The program was designed to give Ph.D. students within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics programs the training they needed to broaden the application of their research and connect it to public policy.