Sharon Wolf, an assistant professor in the human development and quantitative methods division at Penn’s Graduate School of Education, has received the inaugural Outstanding Early Career Investigator Award from the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness. The award recognizes an early career scholar whose work has advanced rigorous research relevant to educational practice.

Dr. Wolf is an applied developmental psychologist who studies how children’s family and educational environments shape their development, focusing on disadvantaged populations in the United States and in low-income countries. Dr. Wolf’s research informs interventions and tests the effectiveness of theoretically informed policy solutions designed to promote childhood development and learning through randomized field experiments. Her current work focuses on three primary areas: developing and evaluating school-based interventions to improve educational quality and child learning outcomes; the measurement of educational settings and children’s learning outcomes; and understanding the links between poverty, education and child development.