Description of Research Expertise

Areas of Expertise

Early childhood risk
Early childhood education
Head Start
Child maltreatment and family violence

Professional Biography

Dr. Fantuzzo is director of the Penn Child Research Center at Penn GSE.

After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, Dr. Fantuzzo took a faculty position at Fuller Graduate School of Psychology and developed the Covenant House, a residential facility for children with serious emotional disorders. In 1983, he joined the faculty at the University of Rochester to work as a research associate at the Mt. Hope Family Center, a special research and treatment facility for young victims of child maltreatment. In 1986, he took a faculty position at California State University at Fullerton to work with a large, diverse Head Start program in Santa Ana. Working with Head Start, he examined the impact of maltreatment and domestic violence on children’s development and learning. This work paved the way for Dr. Fantuzzo’s joining the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 1988. Since that time, he has been involved in a number of federally funded research projects that have involved extensive work with the School District of Philadelphia’s early childhood education programs, building research and service capacities. He serves on the editorial boards of major research journals in education and early childhood (e.g., Journal of Educational Psychology, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, and School Psychology Review). He is a recent recipient of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Involvement and the National Head Start Research Mentor awards.

Research Interests and Current Projects

Dr. Fantuzzo’s research focuses on the design, implementation, and evaluation of school- and community-based strategies for young, low-income children in high-risk urban settings. In recent years, he has conducted longitudinal studies in Head Start that (a) relate to the impact of community and family violence on school readiness; (b) examine the development of approaches to learning; and (c) investigate the effects of early social/emotional adjustment problems and early school success. He is also involved in population-based studies that make use of citywide integrated databases across agencies serving young children. One such longitudinal study, “What’s Behind Being Behind,” examines the impact of multiple risks and early care and educational experiences on the academic proficiency and school adjustment of an entire cohort of third grade children in the School District of Philadelphia.

The success of such projects resulted in grant support to develop an integrated, archival database for children in Philadelphia. Dr. Fantuzzo and Dr. Dennis Culhane, a professor in the School of Social Policy and Practice, worked with the City of Philadelphia and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to create the Kids Integrated Data System (KIDS)—one of the only such municipal databases in the U.S. Most recently, Dr. Fantuzzo and Dr. Culhane have received an additional grant to establish KIDS as a sustainable and transferable resource for research and evaluation in large, urban municipalities.

Dr. Fantuzzo and GSE colleagues are also working on a large research project supported by a grant funded by the federal Interagency School Readiness Consortium to develop and study the effectiveness of cognitive and social/emotional integrated curricula to enhance school readiness for vulnerable low-income, urban preschool children. This project involves research on innovative assessment, curricula, and professional development strategies to enhance school readiness for this population.

Dr. Fantuzzo presented the 2009 Albert M. Greenfield Memorial Lecture, The Educational Well-Being of African-American Boys. To read about the lecture, click here.