As Senior Director of the Fisher-Price Child Research Department and Play Lab, Kathleen Alfano provides child development and play expertise to the product designers and engineers, as well as for company’s web content and articles.
Alfano joined Fisher-Price in 1979 as a Child Research Department educator and researcher. In her tenure, she has evolved the Play Lab, founded in 1961, into the toy industry’s most respected —and often-emulated — research center on childhood development and play.
As a global ambassador of play, Alfano has traveled around the world — from most of Europe, Brazil, Japan and Russia to the Far East — to study learning, play and different cultures, and to speak about her child development research. As a published expert, she has been invited to keynote at a variety of international conferences where she has discussed an array of topics including the importance of play in a child’s development, how to make toys for a global market, how play builds brainpower and how toys boost intelligence.
Alfano holds degrees in in elementary education: a bachelor’s degree from Daemen College in Amherst NY, a master’s degree from Buffalo State University College and a doctorate from the State University of New York at Buffalo, as well as a master’s degree in business administration from Niagara University. As an active member of the early childhood learning community, Alfano holds professional affiliations with the International Toy Researchers Association; the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society; the National Association for the Education of Young Children; the Association for Childhood Education International; the Association for Supervision; and the Curriculum Development, International Reading Association. In addition, Alfano is a sought after speaker at conferences and a published author on the topic of early childhood development and play, writing numerous articles, columns and chapters for publications around the world.
