Lucy Bassett is a professor of practice in public policy at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. Bassett is an expert in children, caregivers, and communities in humanitarian and development contexts. Over her fifteen-year career, Bassett has worked with governments in low- and middle-income countries to expand access to quality education, nutrition and social protection services, particularly for poor and marginalized children and families.

Before joining the Batten School, Bassett spent ten years as an education and social protection specialist with the World Bank. Her practitioners’ perspective is further grounded by previous work at UNICEF, the World Food Programme, Save the Children, the International Food Policy Research Institute and Peace Corps.

She is currently leading research on how to best support young children’s development and learning in humanitarian contexts as well as how to support migrant children and families coming to the US/Mexico border.

Bassett has expertise in designing and evaluating programs to improve nutrition, food security and early childhood development outcomes. She has worked on projects to increase preschool participation of Roma children in Serbia, provide cash transfers and nutrition services to poor Honduran families and improve social service delivery after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Bassett’s work in education focuses on improving quality at the pre-primary and primary levels, and she contributed to the development of a global measurement tool to assess children’s learning and development outcomes and learning environment quality.