Laura Stout Sosinsky is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Fordham University. Her research interests focus on positive early childhood development in context and over time, with emphasis on parenting, child care, and early education. Activities aim to improve the quality of early childhood environments through program design and evaluation and to inform policy construction. The overarching goal is to promote positive development for the whole child, inclusive of social-emotional and cognitive-linguistic domains key to school readiness, by understanding and improving the quality and context of the system of relationships that form each child's environment. Her work includes (1) basic developmental research on the dynamic transactions between a child's developing competencies and his or her immediate family environment, including collaboration with Dr. Alice Carter of the University of Massachusetts at Boston in work on the Connecticut Early Development Project; (2) research on family, industry, and policy contributors to child care quality emphasizing parents as the primary child care decisionmakers, drawing in part on the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, and (3) developmental approaches to prevention, intervention, and evaluation studies of programs to promote high-quality home, child care, and preschool environments and of their associations with parent behaviors and child outcomes, including collaboration with Dr. Walter Gilliam of Yale University on the National Prekindergarten Study. Through a variety of dissemination venues, she aims to reach and connect with extended audiences in multidisciplinary research, practice, and policy arenas as well as with parents regarding early care and education research.
