Mary Bratsch-Hines, Ph.D.
Senior Manager, Research and Evaluation
919.357.3518 • bratsch@coe.ufl.edu
Mary Bratsch-Hines, Ph.D., is the senior manager for research and evaluation at the Lastinger Center for Learning. In this role, Mary oversees the development of research priorities and implementation of product and project evaluation to understand impact and efficacy.
Mary joined the Lastinger team in 2021 from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, where she worked as an advanced research scientist at Frank Porter Graham (FPG) Child Development Institute. She began her career as an early childhood educator, which sparked her desire to study how children’s educational experiences in child care, prekindergarten and early elementary school settings support optimal development. A primary goal of her research is to identify the experiences that are most likely to improve children’s early language and literacy skills, which, in turn, advance their trajectories as successful readers.
An applied statistician concentrating on research design and evaluation, Mary’s projects include experimental evaluations of teacher professional development programs as well as observational studies of children’s early care and education settings. These studies highlight the experiences of socioeconomically, linguistically, racially, and ability diverse children primarily living in rural areas. Mary has been the principal or co-principal investigator of $10 million dollars of funded research and has authored several publications advancing scholarship in the field of early childhood education and literacy. She continues to work on projects with FPG teams, including Targeted Reading Instruction, Early Learning Network, and Family Life Project.
She holds a Ph.D. in Education from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Mary lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where she enjoys playing board games and being outside with her three young children, cooking and baking, and going on walks and bike rides in the countryside.