Craig S. Bailey, PhD

Craig S. Bailey, Ph.D., is Director of Early Childhood at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and Assistant Professor at the Child Study Center in the Yale School of Medicine. As a co-developer of RULER, Dr. Bailey and his team facilitate professional development workshops and develop content for practicing and teaching emotional intelligence. As a researcher, Dr. Bailey conducts psychological, educational, and intervention research, and in general, his research explores children’s social and emotional learning in early childhood classrooms with an emphasis on how educators support and promote the development of empathy and emotion regulation.

With experience as an early childhood educator, Dr. Bailey is passionate about bridging the gap between research and practice, and in Connecticut, he is the PI on several community-based researcher-to-practitioner partnerships funded by local community and family foundations. The Bridgeport Early Childhood SEL Initiative, funded by the Tauck Family Foundation, and the Hartford Early Childhood SEL Initiative, funded by the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, are tasked with ensuring coordinated, high-quality SEL programming and supports for the early childhood educators, young children, and families in and around.

With federal funding from the Institute of Education Sciences, Dr. Bailey is also the PI of an efficacy trial of RULER in preschool settings (#R305A180293) and Co-PI of a grant developing and validating the Social and Emotional Learning Observation Checklist for Elementary School (SELOC-ES; #R305A210262). Dr. Bailey serves as a consultant for numerous initiatives and organizations, most notably for the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning. At home, Dr. Bailey is a proud father of three young children.