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Qi Jiang

Postdoctoral Research Fellow · Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Qi Jiang

I design, evaluate, and study how to scale interventions that support young children and the people who care for them.

Portrait of Qi Jiang

I am a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, working with Professor Aisha Yousafzai, and a research affiliate of Stanford's Rural Education Action Program. I completed my PhD in Health Policy at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health in 2026, advised by Professor Lia C. H. Fernald.

My work sits at the intersection of early childhood development, caregiver mental health, and the delivery systems that determine whether good programs actually reach families. Most of my research has taken place in rural China, where I have spent years running trials and fieldwork alongside local governments, village health workers, and the All-China Women's Federation.

I use cluster-randomized trials and quasi-experimental designs to ask whether an intervention works, and human-centered design, process evaluation, and qualitative interviewing to ask why it works, for whom, and what it would take to sustain it at scale.

Citations
438
h-index
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i10-index
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Google Scholar, August 2026
§ 01Research

Four questions I keep returning to

Early childhood is where inequality compounds fastest and where policy has the most leverage. These are the threads that run through my work.

A research portfolio spanning three fieldsA Venn diagram of three overlapping fields — Early childhood development, Caregiver mental health, Implementation & delivery — meeting at Programs that scale.Early childhooddevelopmentCaregivermental healthImplementation& deliveryProgramsthat scale
Almost every project I run sits in the overlap: an early childhood intervention, the mental health of the adult delivering it, and the government system that has to carry it past the pilot.
  1. 01

    Early childhood development and the home learning environment

    What children in under-resourced rural settings actually experience in their first three years — and how much of later human capital is decided there.

  2. 02

    Caregiver mental health as a determinant of early learning

    Programs for young children are delivered by adults. When those adults are depressed, anxious, or unsupported, the program's theory of change quietly breaks.

  3. 03

    Designing interventions that survive contact with a delivery system

    Building the Thinking Healthy Extended Program inside an existing government system — and studying what happens when it meets real villages, real facilitators, and real constraints.

  4. 04

    Measuring what matters: instruments, bias, and evidence quality

    Global early childhood research runs on screening instruments and caregiver self-report. I study when those tools tell the truth — and when they do not.

Read the full research statement →

§ 02Evidence

One finding, drawn out

Charts redrawn for the web from my published estimates. Two more, on the scale of early delay and on what parental training actually moves, are on the research page.

Measurement

Measured down, reported up

In 137 rural households, caregivers with mental health symptoms had children whose language was objectively lower on LENA audio recordings — and at the same time overestimated that language in their own reports. Both halves come from the same regressions on the same sample.

Measured down, reported up. Adjusted standardised coefficient (SD), 95% CI.
ComparisonEstimate95% confidence intervalp value
What the recorder measured
Stress → child vocalisations−0.75−1.27 to −0.24<0.01
Stress → vocabulary (CDI)−0.57−1.00 to −0.15<0.01
Anxiety → conversational turns−0.54−0.76 to −0.31<0.01
Depression → conversational turns−0.51−0.91 to −0.120.011
Anxiety → child vocalisations−0.44−0.69 to −0.18<0.01
What the caregiver reported
Depression → overstates home talk0.660.40 to 0.93<0.01
Anxiety → overstates child language0.440.10 to 0.770.012
Depression → overstates child language0.26−0.02 to 0.540.064

Each row is a separate regression (N = 137 households, children aged 16–24 months), adjusted for caregiver age and education, child age and sex, whether the mother is the primary caregiver, household size, and a family asset index. Hollow point = not significant at the 0.05 level. Redrawn for the web from the published estimates.

SourceJiang Q, Qian Y, Feng T, et al. Caregiver mental health is associated with early childhood language outcomes and perception bias in rural China. Scientific Reports. 2026;16(1). Open access →

See the other figures →

§ 03Selected work

Papers that show the shape of the research

A complete list, including working papers, is on the publications page.

Peer-reviewed

The Acceptability and Appropriateness of Delivering Postnatal Mental Health Support at Community Health Centers

Yuyin Xiao, Qi Jiang, Yiwei Qian, Jiaqi Shi, Hanwen Zhang, Christina Rose Kennedy, Guohong Li, Fan Jiang, Scott Rozelle

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1557(1) · 2026

In-depth interviews with 50 mothers in Shanghai on whether routine community and township health centers are a workable home for postnatal mental health support — and what would have to change for mothers to actually show up.

doi:10.1111/nyas.70235

Peer-reviewedFirst author

Caregiver mental health is associated with early childhood language outcomes and perception bias in rural China

Qi Jiang, Yiwei Qian, Tianli Feng, Mengmei Du, Hanwen Zhang, Evelyn Zhang, Sarah-Eve Dill, Yue Ma, Scott Rozelle

Scientific Reports, 16(1) · 2026

Using LENA audio recorders in 137 rural households, this paper shows that caregivers with depressive and anxiety symptoms not only have children with weaker measured language outcomes, but systematically overestimate those outcomes — a direct warning about self-report measurement in early childhood research.

doi:10.1038/s41598-026-39674-2

Working paperFirst author

Process Evaluation of a Nonspecialist-Led Mental Health Intervention for Female Caregivers of Infants and Toddlers in Rural China

Qi Jiang, Esther Chung, Yuyin Xiao, Hanwen Zhang, Veronica Lin, Ziye (Clyde) Huang, Xuetong Jiao, Scott Rozelle, Lia C. H. Fernald

Working paper (SSRN) · 2025

A process evaluation of the Thinking Healthy Extended Program, asking what actually happens when a WHO-derived mental health curriculum is handed to non-specialist facilitators in rural villages — fidelity, dose, adaptation, and the everyday frictions that decide whether a program survives contact with a real delivery system.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.5519540

Peer-reviewedFirst author

Effectiveness of a government-led, multiarm intervention on early childhood development and caregiver mental health: a study protocol for a factorial cluster-randomised trial in rural China

Qi Jiang, Boya Wang, Yiwei Qian, Dorien Emmers, Shanshan Li, Lucy Pappas, Eleanor Tsai, Letao Sun, Manpreet Singh, Lia Fernald, Scott Rozelle

BMJ Open, 13(11), e076644 · 2023

The design of a four-arm, 125-village factorial cluster-randomized trial delivered by the All-China Women's Federation, testing parenting stimulation and a Thinking Healthy–derived caregiver mental health curriculum separately and together — built from the start to run inside an existing government system rather than beside it.

doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2023-076644

Peer-reviewedFirst author

Parenting centers and caregiver mental health: Evidence from a large-scale randomized controlled trial in China

Qi Jiang, Sarah-Eve Dill, Sean Sylvia, Manpreet K. Singh, Xinshu She, Eric Wang, Alexis Medina, Scott Rozelle

Child Development, 93(5), 1559–1573 · 2022

A cluster-randomized trial of village parenting centers across 100 rural villages and 1,664 caregivers found no overall improvement in caregiver mental health — evidence that early childhood programs without an explicit mental health component should not be assumed to help the adults delivering the care.

doi:10.1111/cdev.13782

Peer-reviewedFirst author

Depressive and Anxiety Symptoms among Children and Adolescents in Rural China: A Large-Scale Epidemiological Study

Qi Jiang, Xinshu She, Sarah-Eve Dill, Sean Sylvia, Manpreet Kaur Singh, Huan Wang, Matthew Boswell, Scott Rozelle

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(9), 5026 · 2022

An epidemiological study of 53,421 school-aged children across China documenting that 20% are at risk for depression and 68% for at least one type of anxiety — and that these symptoms correlate consistently with standardized math scores.

doi:10.3390/ijerph19095026

Peer-reviewed

Early childhood development and parental training interventions in rural China: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Dorien Emmers, Qi Jiang, Hao Xue, Yue Zhang, Yunting Zhang, Yingxue Zhao, Bin Liu, Sarah-Eve Dill, Yiwei Qian, Nele Warrinnier, Hannah Johnstone, Jianhua Cai, Xiaoli Wang, Lei Wang, Renfu Luo, Guirong Li, Jiajia Xu, Ming Liu, Yaqing Huang, Wenjie Shan, Zhihui Li, Yu Zhang, Sean Sylvia, Yue Ma, Alexis Medina, Scott Rozelle

BMJ Global Health, 6(8), e005578 · 2021

A systematic review and meta-analysis across 29 studies, in both English and Chinese sources, estimating that 45% of young children in rural study sites are at risk of cognitive delay — and that parental training programs improve cognition, language, and social-emotional development.

doi:10.1136/bmjgh-2021-005578

All publications →

§ 04Recent

News

  • Started a postdoctoral fellowship (2026–2028) in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, working with Professor Aisha Yousafzai.

  • New paper in Nursing Reports on psychological flexibility as a mediator between parenting stress and depression among Chinese caregivers of infants.

  • Completed my PhD in Health Policy at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, advised by Professor Lia C. H. Fernald.

  • New paper in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences on whether community health centers are an acceptable and appropriate venue for postnatal mental health support in Shanghai.

  • New paper in Scientific Reports: caregiver mental health is associated with both children's measured language outcomes and how caregivers perceive those outcomes — a caution for self-report measurement in early childhood research.

  • Process evaluation of the Thinking Healthy Extended Program — a nonspecialist-delivered caregiver mental health intervention in rural China — released as a working paper.

§ 05People

Advisors and collaborators

Three institutions, one continuous line of work on early childhood and the wellbeing of the adults raising children.

Lia C. H. Fernald — Photo: liahf.com · Aisha Yousafzai — Photo: Harvard Pop Center · Scott Rozelle — Photo: Stanford FSI

§ 06Contact

Get in touch

I am glad to hear from collaborators, students, and anyone working on early childhood, caregiver wellbeing, or the practical problem of making good programs reach people at scale.

qi_jiang@hsph.harvard.edu