Stephanie Curenton-Jolly, PhD is the founder of Early Learning Access where she presently serves as the CEO. Stephanie’s goal is to use applied developmental psychology research strives to inform policy making and improve practice in education and health for young children. Her passion lies in promoting the health and education of young children by using research to inform culturally responsive teaching practices and socially equitable public policies. Stephanie specializes in researching the healthy growth and development of Black children as well as other children who are socially marginalized due to their language, identity, or geographic location, and she has expertise in early childhood education and policy and children’s language and literacy development.
Stephanie is a developmental and community psychologist who received her bachelor’s degree from Wittenberg University and her master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Virginia. She has been a professor at Florida State University, Rutgers University, and is now a professor at Boston University. In addition, to her positions in academia, is a research fellow at Urban Institute, and she occasionally provides research consultation to Abt Associates, MDRC, and Mathematica Policy Research. She has been awarded two policy fellowships, one from the Society for Research on Child Development (SRCD)/American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the other from the National Black Child Development Institute.
Her work appears in numerous scholarly publications, and its practical applications are featured in three books: Don’t Look Away (Gryphon, 2020), Conversation Compass: A Teacher’s Guide to High-Quality Language Learning for Young Children (Redleaf, 2016), The CRAF-E4 Family Engagement Model (Elseiver, 2014), and Cultural Competence in Early Childhood Education (Bridgepointe Education, 2013). She has served as associate editor for Early Childhood Research Quarterly and Early Education and Development, and she has served on the editorial board for Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology and Child Development.
Curenton serves on the Massachusetts Board of Early Education and Care, In the past, she has also served on education nonprofit boards for National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) and local Head Start programs. In collaboration with her colleague, Iheoma Iruka, Curenton co-founded the Researchers Investigating Sociocultural Equity and Race (RISER) Network, a mentoring network for scholars interested in conducting research with Black children.
