Kimberlyn Leary
Senior Fellow, Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University
Associate Professor of Psychology, Harvard Medical School
Associate Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
About
Dr. Kimberlyn Leary has served as the Executive Vice President at the Urban Institute, a Senior Advisor at New America, and will join the faculty of the Harvard Kennedy School as an Emma Bloomberg Lecturer in Policy and Management. She is a consulting advisor to the Gates Foundation and the Boston Foundation and previously served as an advisor to the National Math and Science Initiative.
Dr. Leary also holds academic appointments as an associate professor at Harvard Medical School/McLean Hospital and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and has held two roles in federal service: in the Obama White House as an advisor to the Council on Women and Girls, as a senior advisor to the Biden White House Domestic Policy Council, and as a fellow in the Office of Management and Budget.
Dr. Leary holds a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Amherst College, a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan, and a Master in Public Administration from Harvard University. She also trained as a psychoanalyst at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute.
She had held fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In April of 2024, she was a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center resident, where she developed a set of writing projects based on leading change across the federal ecosystem.
