Nazli Baydar is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Koç Üniversitesi in Istanbul. Baydar has worked on various human capital projects including evaluations of Job Corps and WIC. However, her interest lies in early childhood and the development of human capital prior to entry into formal schooling. She has also worked on interventions with Head Start populations. Baydar believes that interventions must be creative and flexible when early childhood is spent almost entirely within the home with no exposure to structured or institutionalized education, and with no endorsement of structured early childhood education by the public. She is interested in three main research questions: (1) the sources of variability in intervention effects (how much of what works for who); (2) what are the causal developmental processes that are activated by different aspects of intervention programs; and, (3) how can we measure and evaluate impacts of interventions on developmental trajectories.

Baydar received her Ph.D. from Vrije University in Brussels in 1984 and completed postdoctoral work at Stanford, Princeton, and Columbia Universities focusing on the application of advanced statistical modeling approaches to longitudinal data.