“I feel very fortunate to have had him as a doctoral student – he’s taught me much more than I probably ever taught him,” Conroy remarks. “We’re so fortunate to have him in the field again because he’s the future.”

Boyd completed his undergraduate studies at the College of William and Mary before working in a preschool classroom for autistic children where a UNC doctoral candidate was conducting education research. Watching the Ph.D. student craft the research program and interact with children and families sparked Boyd’s interest in going to graduate school himself.

“It was really seeing it hands-on – the connection between direct work with children and families, but also how you shape a research agenda around that work,” shares Boyd, who hadn’t considered academia as a career path prior. “It allowed me to see a meaningful connection between those two things.”

It was while he was studying for his master’s degree at the University of Virginia that he first connected with Conroy at UF. “She was doing this innovative, exciting research around children with autism. It just felt like a good place to be.”

“At the time, my plan was to go teach for a few years in the public school system after I got my master’s degree at UVA,” Boyd explains. “But I connected with Maureen and ended up going straight from my masters degree into the doctoral program instead.”

Boyd earned his Ph.D. in special education from UF before returning to UNC for his post-doc work, but even then continued to benefit from the connections he made through Conroy as one of Conroy’s colleagues, Sam Odom, was serving as director of FPG.

“I was on the job market looking for places to go, and Sam asked me if I’d like to stay and work for Frank Porter Graham after my post-doc – so that’s what I did,” Boyd mentions. 

He worked as an investigator with FPG for two years before he was offered a tenured-track faculty position at UNC. He would go on to mentor several UNC doctoral candidates after first serving as dissertation chair for UF alumnus Dwight Irvin, Ph.D., who earned his bachelor’s degree from the UF College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Irvin is now an associate professor at the College of Education and a member of the Anita Zucker Center. 

Irvin’s research uses technology to better understand and enrich young children’s language environments. He tributes Boyd with providing the support and encouragement that led him to pursue his own academic career.

“I felt like he was very committed to my success as a graduate student and doing well overall,” Irvin notes. “He’s always been a great role model. In terms of his work ethic, his scientific rigor, his ability to build teams and take chances and do innovative work – he represents how to be a high caliber researcher and a great human being at the same time.”

Mentor and mentee would cross paths again when Boyd served as director of the Juniper Gardens Children’s Project at the University of Kansas while Irvin was working there as an assistant research professor. Boyd would eventually return to UNC in 2022, was named interim director of FPG in February 2023, and was officially appointed director in April of this year.

FPG’s mission centers around understanding child development and promoting positive outcomes for all children and families, which aligns with the research Boyd himself has conducted over the years. Boyd’s early research concentrated on repetitive behaviors of children with autism, a focus that developed from a conversation with an autistic child’s mother. 

“She was talking about her child’s focused interests, and that his first word was ‘pentagon.’ That made me really interested in why that was his first word, and how we could use those focused interests to promote social interaction and communication for autistic kids,” Boyd recalls. Interactions like these have continued to shape Boyds research agenda throughout his career.