Team

In July 2024, Jack Shonkoff transitioned from his full-time role as Director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University since its founding in 2006 to focus all of his energy on Connecting Science and Community, while maintaining his connection to the Center as Founding Director.

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Jeremy Guardiola is Advisor for Strategic Initiatives. In this role, he supports Dr. Shonkoff in developing collaborative relationships with partners in the early childhood and place-based fields. He has spent his career working on a range of programmatic and policy approaches designed to promote conditions in which families and young people thrive.

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Cindy Martell serves as Executive Coordinator to Dr. Shonkoff. In this role, she manages his administrative needs as well as supports office management tasks for the Center on the Developing Child.

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Douglas Jutte, MD, MPH is the founder and past executive director of the Build Healthy Places Network. BHPN is a national organization working across the sectors of health, community development, and finance to drive more impactful, collaborative neighborhood investments that reduce poverty, advance racial equity, and improve health. Dr. Jutte served for a decade as a trustee of Mercy Housing, the nation’s largest nonprofit affordable housing developer, and as an advisory committee member for several national healthcare and community development finance organizations, including CommonSpirit Health, Trinity Health, Primary Care Development Corporation, and Enterprise Community Partners. In addition, he was one of three Senior Scientific Editors for the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2021 report on Community Health & Economic Prosperity.

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Dr. Natalie Slopen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. She is also an affiliated faculty member at the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. As a social epidemiologist, Dr. Slopen works on a range of studies on topics related to the social and structural determinants of children’s health and health disparities across the life course. Her research critically examines the impacts of socioeconomic disadvantage, racism, neighborhood context, housing, and other adverse experiences on children’s mental and physical health outcomes and opportunities to promote health equity. 

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David R. Williams is the Norman Professor of Public Health at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard. The author of over 500 scientific papers, his research has enhanced our understanding of the ways in which race, socioeconomic status, racism, stress, health behaviors and religious involvement can affect health. The Everyday Discrimination Scale that he developed is the most widely used measure of discrimination in health studies. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

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Al Race provides strategic direction for the communications team. He currently consults with social change organizations focused on translating science to shift mindsets around important issues affecting children, teens, and older people. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center on the Developing Child and previously served as Deputy Director and Chief Knowledge Officer until his retirement in 2021. As part of the core leadership group that founded and grew the Center starting in 2006, his focus was on how to use credible, peer-reviewed, scientific knowledge to transform the landscape in which science-based innovation for children and families facing adversity can thrive and grow.

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Beth Balawick is a marketing, strategic storytelling, and project management consultant who works with visionaries and entrepreneurs to streamline processes and maximize impact. She began her career as a documentary filmmaker and formerly served as the Multimedia Producer at the Center on the Developing Child.

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Nat Kendall-Taylor serves as Chief Executive Officer at the FrameWorks Institute. He oversees the organization’s pioneering, research-based approach to strategic communications, which uses methods from the social and behavioral sciences to measure how people understand complex socio-political issues and tests ways to reframe them to drive social change. He has consulted with and conducted research for the Center on the Developing Child and the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child since 2008 and currently serves as a Senior Fellow.

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