News Archive

March 13, 2025
The STEM Innovation for Inclusion in Early Education Center (STEMIE)—a national technical assistance center working to ensure that all young children with and without disabilities are engaged in early STEM learning—has begun providing targeted technical assistance to cohorts of faculty and practitioners in the early childhood education field.

March 9, 2025
March 8th is International Women’s Day, and the entire month of March is Women's History Month here in the U.S. In honor of International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month, we’re celebrating all of the inspiring and dedicated women of FPG, who are represented by their work, their publications, through news stories, and more across our website.

March 4, 2025
Dorothy Cilenti considers herself a “pracademic.” She is committed to taking what she learns in the academic environment and using that knowledge to impact outcomes in the practice community. Cilenti, a clinical professor in the Department of Maternal and Child Health at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, is a faculty fellow at the UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (FPG).

February 27, 2025
To help spread the word on how researchers can empower local communities through collaboration, Allison De Marco and several Educare colleagues presented, “Seeing Communities as Experts on their Own Data: A Research-Practice Partnership” during Carolina Engagement Week, which brought together Carolina faculty, staff and students with community partners to highlight partnerships between UNC-Chapel Hill and North Carolina communities.

February 24, 2025
The UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health has announced the recipients of the second Gillings Research Excellence Awards. Seven faculty members, including FPG Faculty Fellow Sean Sylvia, will receive $500 each to support their research, scholarship, and professional development.

February 19, 2025
Carolina Engagement Week 2025 will bring together Carolina faculty, staff, and students with community partners to highlight partnerships between UNC-Chapel Hill and North Carolina communities via a series of more than 40 events, including skill-building workshops, research presentations, panel discussions and more. And three of these events will feature researchers from the UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute.

February 18, 2025
Kara Hume, a faculty fellow at UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, was named the recipient of the 2025 Council for Exceptional Children’s Division on Autism and Developmental Disabilities (DADD) Research Award — a recognition that honors outstanding contributions to research supporting individuals with autism, intellectual disability, and other developmental disabilities.

February 12, 2025
The UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (FPG) is pleased to announce our upcoming Distinguished Lecture. Catherine Bradshaw, PhD, MEd, will present, "School-Based Prevention of Behavioral & Mental Health Problems: Integrating and Advancing the Evidence Base."

February 11, 2025
FPG's Chih-Ing Lim and Megan Vinh have been named as the recipients of the 2025 Thelma Harms Early Childhood Education Award. The award—awarded to FPG employees or international practitioners working with an FPG employee on an early childhood project—is designed to further the understanding and improvement of early childhood program quality internationally.

February 6, 2025
The STEM Innovation for Inclusion in Early Education (STEMIE) Center creates products and implements services to expand knowledge awareness, acquisition, and implementation of STEM evidence-informed practices. The STEMIE website is an essential part of the Center's work and so they recently redesigned it complete with new tools to ensure optimal access to and use of STEMIE’s many resources.

January 31, 2025
Soon after Laura Klinger joined the faculty at UNC in 2011 as an associate professor in the department of psychiatry and as executive director of the UNC TEACCH Autism Program, she became a faculty fellow at UNC’s Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute. Her desire to connect with FPG stemmed from the Institute’s preeminent role in research on early child development, a natural fit for her research interests in autism.

January 28, 2025
This May, the International Early Childhood Inclusion Institute will celebrate a quarter-century of longstanding work in early childhood inclusion at the UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute. The milestone event will reflect on and honor the progress made and look toward a future where every child truly belongs.

January 27, 2025
Lisa Kristianson is a project coordinator at the UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (FPG). As part of our FPG profile series, we recently spoke with Kristianson to learn more about her work at FPG. Find out what she had to say.

January 23, 2025
With support from a one-year NC TraCS clinical and translational science pilot program grant, Ayse Belger, a faculty fellow at FPG, partnered with Alper Bozkurt, PhD, to develop a wearable stress-tracking device. The prototype device, designed to be worn on the user’s wrist, contains microcircuits that are self-powered by the wearer’s body heat, sweat, motion, and interstitial fluids, preventing the need to charge the device.

January 13, 2025
FPG's growing publications library includes almost 2,700 journal articles, policy briefs, assessment tools, learning modules, and multimedia to support multiple audiences at home and abroad. We've gathered a list of some of our most recent publications—and encourage you to click through to learn more about the amazing work being done here at FPG.

January 10, 2025
FPG Faculty Fellows are UNC-Chapel Hill faculty members who play a vital role at our Institute by fostering innovative and interdisciplinary work and increasing our collaborations and impact across campus and beyond. Discover new updates from two of our faculty fellows--Heather Wasser and Gabriel Dichter.

January 6, 2025
The UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute is committed to generating knowledge, informing policies, and supporting practices to promote positive developmental and educational outcomes for children of all backgrounds and all abilities from the earliest years. Within the Institute, is a diverse team of scholars who collaborate on a variety of projects and research aimed at improving outcomes for students on the spectrum and providing tools and support to caregivers and teachers who support and serve them.

December 23, 2024
Jada Walker, MEd, is a project coordinator working in early care and education/Pre-K research at the UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (FPG). As part of our FPG profile series, we recently spoke with Walker to learn more about her work at FPG. See what she had to say.