Christina Hinton

Christina Hinton, Ed.D., our Flourishing Schools Lead, leads the education work at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard. She combines rigorous interdisciplinary scholarship with a deep commitment to use research to make real-world impact.

Dr. Hinton is an internationally recognized academic with expertise in promoting character skills, loving relationships, and flourishing among children, adolescents, educators, and parents. At the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, she leads education research internationally, including, for example, randomized controlled trials on interventions to foster kindness, friendship, and flourishing, longitudinal studies on the distribution and determinants of flourishing in children and adolescents, and mixed methods studies on evidence-based practices to promote character skills and flourishing in schools. At the Harvard Graduate School Education, where she lectured for many years, she led research on related topics ranging from the neurobiological basis of empathy to a cosmopolitan ethic of care.  

Dr. Hinton works at the nexus of research, policy, and practice. She regularly serves as an expert advisor to leading international organizations, including UNESCO, OECD, UNICEF, and Sesame Workshop. She worked in multilateral diplomacy and international policymaking for many years at the OECD’s Center for Educational Research and Innovation and UNICEF’s Early Childhood Development Unit. Dr. Hinton is also the Founder and CEO of Research Schools International (RSI), which has led more than eighty projects to support character skills, positive relationships, and flourishing in schools across seventy countries. At the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, she also leads our Evidence-Based Parenting for Flourishing Families initiative.

Dr. Hinton completed her doctorate and master’s at Harvard in education, neuroscience, and child development, and her bachelors at Swarthmore in neuroscience and education.