Amalee McCoy, DPhil.

Amalee McCoy is the Lead and Co-Principal Investigator for the Parenting for Lifelong Health (PLH) Thailand Project at the Peace Culture Foundation. She has over 20 years of experience in child protection and child rights programming, quantitative and qualitative research, policy advocacy, project management, safeguarding, and capacity building with international and local NGOs, UN agencies, and academia, with a focus on the Asian region. Dr. McCoy’s programme and research interests centre on the evidence-based prevention of violence against children, regional advocacy and South-to-South knowledge exchange, and strategic planning for child protection systems strengthening.

Dr. McCoy was previously the Research Manager for the initial phase of the PLH Thailand Project while based at the University of Oxford and working in partnership with UNICEF Thailand and the Thai Ministry of Public Health (MOPH). She serves as an expert member on the MOPH Working Group on Parenting Education and has co-developed the PLH facilitation and training modules and manuals for Thailand. Dr. McCoy has recently worked on several parenting projects with UN agencies, including on the World Health Organization INTEGRATE project, with UNICEF Montenegro on a feasibility assessment for scaling-up PLH, and with UNICEF Thailand on community-based research and the development of a five-year strategy for the prevention of violence against children through parenting interventions. In addition, Dr. McCoy has been a staff member at the UNICEF East Asia and Pacific Regional Office, Plan International Thailand, the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), as well as ECPAT International. During her career to date, Amalee has worked in diverse contexts, including Malaysia, Cambodia, the Philippines, China, Mongolia, Fiji, Samoa, Pakistan, Lao PDR, Viet Nam, Indonesia, and South Korea.

Dr. McCoy obtained her doctorate in Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation at the University of Oxford. She also holds a MSc (Distinction) in Evidence-Based Social Intervention from Oxford; a MA (Distinction) in Child and Adolescent Welfare from Charles Sturt University; and a MA in Southeast Asian Studies from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. She is based in Bangkok and a Thai-American dual national.