Cindy Bernheimer, Senior Research Associate
CINDY, as a Senior Research Associate for the San Marcos office, is responsible for supporting ongoing continuous improvement across all projects, designing evaluation instruments for Teaching Pyramid and BEGINNING TOGETHER trainings, analyzing and summarizing the data, and sharing the results with WestEd staff and funders.
Cindy has spent more than 30 years in the field of early childhood special education. Her work has focused on program evaluation and longitudinal research on children with disabilities and their families. She served as a co-director of Project REACH within the UCLA Department of Psychiatry’s Sociobehavioral Group from 1985 to 2004. She has been involved in program and systems evaluations at the local, state and national levels and has served as evaluator for the Chartwell Education Group, the Hilton/Early Head Start training program, the California Early Intervention Distance Learning Project, and the California Early Intervention Evaluation: Implementation of Part H and the Family Resource Centers.
She has published and presented widely on early childhood special education and issues pertaining to families of children with disabilities and has been a reviewer of academic journals including Child Development, Topics in Early Childhood Special Education, American Journal on Mental Retardation, Infants and Young Children and Early Childhood Research Quarterly.
Cindy has an M.A. in Communicative Disorders from University of Southern California and a Ph.D. in Early Childhood and Developmental Studies at University of California, Los Angeles.