Fuhua Zhai is an Associate Professor at Fordham University Graduate School of Social Service and a Research Associate at Columbia University Population Research Center. His research interests include early childhood education, early interventions, child maltreatment and child welfare, cultural values and child rearing practices, and cross-national child and family policies and programs. He has been using experimental designs and rigorous statistical methods to estimate impacts of programs and policies, especially those targeting children from low-income families.

Zhai received a B.A. in Social Work from China Youth University for Political Sciences School of Social Work in 1998, a M.S.W. from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) School of Social Work in 2004, and a M.Phi. and a Ph.D. from Columbia University School of Social Work in 2006 and 2007, respectively.