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Portrait of Gilda Morelli
Boston College teaching record

Gilda Morelli

Department Chair, Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology

CDEP

Biography

Gilda Morelli is Department Chair of the Counseling, Developmental and Educational Psychology Department at Boston College. Her research examines the role of socioecological and cultural processes in mediating young children’s relational experiences. This work began with Efe hunters and gatherers of DR Congo over 30 years ago and represents one strand of research on similarities and differences in young children’s social experiences in communities in DR Congo, Gabon, the U.S. and Guatemala. Morelli, currently, is examining young children’s use of relational networks to secure needed scarce resources. Morelli co-founded the Ituri Peoples Project Fund (501c3) to support the education and health of families living in the Ituri Providence of DR Congo and she was an SRCD Policy Fellow in, and later consultant for, the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) on children’s care in formal and informal settings. Prof Morelli is involved with efforts to strengthen the evidentiary basis of culturally relevant early childhood care and education interventions. As part of this effort, she chaired and co-organized an SRCD sponsored workshop of researchers, practitioners, and NGO representatives from different regions worldwide. The aim was to promote productive conversation on children’s care, learning and development. The workshop was supported by grants from the Spencer Foundation and the LEGO Foundation. Currently, Morelli is part of a team of researchers examining the effectiveness of guidelines put into place by the Society of Research in Child Development to ensure that journal authors explicitly consider sociocultural contexts in research on children and families and in their description, analysis and interpretation of manuscripts published in SRCD journals. The initiative is supported by grants from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundations and by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Official BC profile · Curriculum vitae

Official evaluation summary

3.59 / 5

Based on 96 aggregate responses from BC Avalanche/Blue evaluations.

Data freshness

Profile and evaluation data last updated 2026-09-06. See Data Sources for provenance and limitations.

Courses taught