FPG's Wendy Morgan provides strategic and scalable infrastructure for the ITTI Care Project. Funded by the NCDCDEE and housed at Duke University, the project offers professional development for the infant/toddler child care workforce across the state of North Carolina to support the provision of trauma-informed child care.

For the past 10 years, members of the autism team, including Ann Sam, Victoria Waters, and Sam Odom, at the UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute have provided Autism Focused Intervention Resources & Modules, offering evidence-based practices to support learners on the spectrum from birth to 22 years of age. To celebrate this decade milestone and April’s Autism Acceptance Month, the AFIRM team launched its new website this week.

Developmental psychologist Clare Harrop, PhD, orients her research within this quote from the late renowned developmental psychologist Annette Karmiloff-Smith, “Development itself is the key to understanding developmental disorders.” This has led Harrop, a faculty fellow at the FPG and an associate professor in Carolina’s Department of Health Sciences, to study autism as a condition that evolves and changes with development and across key developmental periods.

Victoria Waters, MEd, is an educational consultant at the UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (FPG). As part of our FPG profile series, we recently spoke with Waters to learn more about her work at FPG. See what she had to say.

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.

Our Summer Graduate Internship Program in Implementation Practice is designed to create a challenging and meaningful professional experience for the trainees that includes mentoring, networking, professional development, and experiential learning opportunities.

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.

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.

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."