is senior vice president of communications and publications at Learning Forward and the editor of The Learning Professional magazine. She has written about education and child development for national outlets including The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, U.S. News and World Report, and PBS Kids for Parents, as well as educational publications such as Educational Leadership and Kappan. She is the author of The Most Important Year: Pre-Kindergarten and the Future of Our Children (Avery, 2017) and co-author of Teaching with a Social, Emotional, and Cultural Lens (Harvard Education Press, 2020), and Ready, Willing, and Able: A Developmental Approach to College Access and Success (Harvard Education Press, 2012). She has a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Duke University and spent ten years as a researcher at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. With a unique background that combines writing, editing, and academia, she has a passion for making research accessible to practitioners and the general public.