Sara Hart

Professor
Headshot of Sara Hart

BSc Hons. (Western University), MS (Pennsylvania State University), PhD (Ohio State University)

Contact information

Individual Differences in Cognitive Development Lab

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Canadian Excellence Research Chair in Developmental Science

I am currently recruiting graduate students for Fall 2025.

Dr. Hart's research is funded by grants from the:

  • Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)
  • National Institutes of Health
  • National Science Foundation

Research interests

Personalized Education. Most of my work to date has focused on using twin and genomic methods to understand the "nature" and "nurture" of child development. I examine the role of an individual’s genetic variants in predicting school achievement and intervention response. I also spend a lot of time trying to understand the direct role of environments around children, controlling for genetic predispositions. I currently have a US-based national twin project, NatPAT, to examine the genetic and environmental influences on the co-development of reading and math skills through elementary school. Part of this work is to look at the short- and long-term impacts of COVID-19 on those twins reading and math development. I also have a project looking at genomic and contextual correlates of response to a grade 1 reading intervention.

Data Sharing. I work in the field of meta-science, understanding how scientists do science, with a particular interest in supporting rigorous and reproducible educational and developmental science. I currently have project to build a data repository, LDbase, to support the data storage and data access needs of scientists working in fields of developmental science related to education. I also explore ways to support the field in open science practices.

Recent publications

For an up-to-date list of publications check out Dr. Hart's Google Scholar profile.