Guilherme Lichand

Guilherme Lichand

Assistant Professor
Assistant: Krezna Palces
Office: Raikes 315A

Biography

Guilherme is proudly Brazilian. His research focuses on the sources of educational inequities in the global South and on solutions with the potential to overturn them. He is co-director at the Stanford Lemann Center and a faculty affiliate at the Stanford King Center on Global Development, the Stanford Center on Early Childhood, the Stanford Institute for Advancing Just Societies, and the UC Berkeley Center for Effective Global Action. He holds a PhD in Political Economy and Government from Harvard University. He was previously the UNICEF Professor of Child Well-being and Development at the University of Zurich. Guilherme is also a co-founder of Brazilian EdTech Movva, a student success management system supporting vulnerable students graduate college. He was acknowledged by the Schwab Foundation as top-10 Brazilian social entrepreneur in 2020 (post-Covid legacy) and by MIT Technology Review as the top under-35 Brazilian innovator in 2014. His research has been published in numerous scientific journals, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and Nature Human Behavior, and campaigns featuring his work won multiple awards, including two lions at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

Other titles

Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Education

Program affiliations

DAPS
SHIPS (PhD)
SHIPS (PhD): Global and Comparative Education
(MA) GCE/IEPA

Research interests

Achievement | Adolescence | Assessment, Testing and Measurement | Child Development | Data Sciences | Early Childhood | Economics and Education | Educational Policy | Elementary Education | Equity in Education | Gender Issues | International and Comparative Education | Learning Differences | Literacy and Language | Math Education | Motivation | Parents and Family Issues | Poverty and Inequality | Research Methods | School Reform | Social and Emotional Learning | Special Education | Teachers and Teaching | Technology and Education

Recent publications

Bugden, S., Ansari, D., Lichand, G., Avornyo, E. A., & Wolf, S. (2026). Non-Symbolic Magnitude Processing Is a Strong Correlate of Symbolic Math Skills in Children From Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire. Developmental Science, 29(3), e70129.
Lichand, G., Lopes, L., & Allums, S. (2026). Reading ability conflates SES creativity gaps. NPJ Science of Learning.
Kumar, A., Bloomfield, J., Balsa, A., Do (Heather), H., Cid, A., Lichand, G., & Wolf, S. (2025). Sociodemographic predictors of depression among economically vulnerable mothers in urban Uruguay. JOURNAL OF AFFECTIVE DISORDERS REPORTS, 21.

Guilherme Lichand in the News & Media

In a research experiment with middle school students, Assistant Professor Guilherme Lichand and collaborators found that those who initially had access to AI assistance on a creative assignment, and then had it taken away, performed far worse than their peers who didn’t have access to AI on a subsequent word-association task.
Research led by Assistant Professor Guilherme Lichand through Equidade.info, an initiative of the GSE's Lemann Center, finds that students report paying more attention in class since a new law restricting the use of smartphones in elementary and high schools took effect this year.