Three Things All Journalists Should Understand About Early Childhood Science, Practice, and Policy

Jack Shonkoff is the Julius B. Richmond FAMRI Professor of Child Health and Development at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Harvard Graduate School of Education; Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital; and Founding Director of the university-wide Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. He has served as Chair of the Board on Children, Youth, and Families at the National Academy of Sciences and led a blue-ribbon committee that produced the landmark report, From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development. Dr. Shonkoff has received multiple honors, including elected membership to the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) of the National Academy of Sciences, the C. Anderson Aldrich Award in Child Development from the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Public Policy for Children from the Society for Research in Child Development. In 2011, he launched Frontiers of Innovation, a multi-sectoral, R&D platform that engages researchers, practitioners, policymakers, community leaders, parents, investors, and experts in systems change who are committed to driving science-based innovation that achieves breakthrough impacts on the development and lifelong health of young children and families facing adversity.