Pamela Joshi

Pamela Joshi is dedicated to improving social and economic policies and reducing the administrative burden of human service programs to better serve historically underserved communities, families, and children. As part of the Institute for Equity in Child Opportunity & Healthy development (IECOHD), her research examines how structural factors (e.g., job quality, segregation) and system-level barriers (e.g., exclusionary eligibility criteria, complex applications) shape equitable access to essential resources and opportunities that drive health and well-being outcomes. To address the lack of systematic attention to equity in policy analysis, she led the development of the Policy Equity Assessment (PEA) framework, a tool for evaluating racial equity in public policies affecting children’s healthy development.

Joshi conducts her research in partnership with government agencies, policy research organizations, and community-based groups. With funding from federal agencies and foundations, she co-leads a study with UnidosUS on barriers to Hispanic and immigrant families’ access to state-level paid leave benefits, co-leads the Massachusetts Child Care Research Partnership, a state-university collaboration evaluating innovations in child care subsidy policies, and serves as policy research director for diversitydatakids.org.

She disseminates findings through peer-reviewed publications, policy briefs, data visualizations, popular press, and testimony before legislative committees. Her work appears in journals spanning health (Health Affairs), employment (Monthly Labor Review), family science (Journal of Marriage and Family), child development (Early Childhood Research Quarterly), and social services (Children and Youth Services Review).

Joshi brings an equity perspective to diverse policy discussions. She served as a senior policy advisor to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Human Services Policy and was a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Child Opportunity Gap consensus study. She currently serves on the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s Community Development Research Advisory Council and facilitates a research collaborative on Actionable Policy Equity Assessments in Early Care and Education for the Health & Human Services Administration for Children and Families’ Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation.