I aim to apply my work in the classroom by offering early childhood and elementary school teachers instructional practices that support the development of children’s learning-related skills.
Professor
My areas of expertise include social-emotional learning, self-regulation, school readiness, and research methods.
My program of research extends beyond past work on the role that early experiences play in supporting or hindering positive social-emotional and academic outcomes in young children by examining risk and protective factors in the home and school contexts using cutting-edge, longitudinal and causal methods as well as understudied, ecologically vulnerable populations.
One line research focuses on how young children’s peer interactions, including their social engagement and social competencies, are related to their executive functioning skills. Another line of my work focuses on the role that physical well-being, and specifically sleep, plays in the development of executive functioning, emotion regulation, and achievement.