Speakers Bureau

Dr. Eurnestine Brown brings a wealth of experience to her roles as Program Director and the first Director of Relational Equity and Belonging at BTC and as the Director of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Belonging, and Access in the Division of Developmental Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital. She leads our efforts to become an anti-racist and inclusive center/division that promotes sustainable excellence by creating an organizational culture that is committed to equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging.

As a developmental psychologist with 25+ years of experience, Dr. Brown is dedicated to improving the lives of birthing people, families, infants, toddlers, and children — especially those who are racially and historically marginalized. She moderates BTC’s Parenting While Black webinars, which are part of the Family-to-Family Real Talk Series. She has extensive experience in research design, implementation, analysis, and evaluation, and all aspects of data collection, observation, and coding with infants, children, and families. She has consulted for nonprofit agencies, school districts, and child and adolescent clinics across the United States. She is a former Early Head Start/Head Start Program Director.

Dr. Brown is co-editor of African-American Women: An Ecological Perspective and has published papers in journals such as Developmental Psychology and Development and Psychopathology. She is a Board Member for Infant Massage USA.

Jayne Singer, PhD, IECMH-E®, is the Director of Developmental and Relational Health at BTC, Senior Attending Psychologist at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH), and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Singer is a clinical psychologist with over 40 years of experience in hospital, school, and community-based settings. At BCH, she provides evaluation and treatment for families and children with medical, developmental, emotional, behavioral, and familial challenges, including trauma. She is Past President of the Massachusetts Association for Infant Mental Health. At BCH, she co-launched an early detection of autism program and the Cardiac Neurodevelopmental Program.

An International Facilitator of the Brazelton Touchpoints Approach and the Newborn Behavioral Observations system, Dr. Singer spearheaded BTC’s Early Care and Education Initiative as an adaptation of the Touchpoints Approach to promote social-emotional health and strong provider-parent partnerships in early education. BTC’s Early Childhood Initiative became a strong foundation for its Tribal Touchpoints Initiative as well as the 2010–20 Office of Head Start National Center on Parent, Family, and Community Engagement. She also created adaptations of the Touchpoints Approach for families living with children with developmental challenges, for families living in the context of substance use disorder recovery, and for mental health practitioners.

Dr. Singer is the primary author of the Touchpoints in Early Care and Education Reference Guide and the Touchpoints in Reflective Practice guides for practitioners and mentors. Her expertise is reflected in her array of speaking engagements for professionals and parent audiences on many topics, including child development, trauma, neurodevelopmental disorders, early relational health, family engagement, and infant mental health and clinical practice.

Joshua Sparrow, MD, DFAACP, is executive director of the Brazelton Touchpoints Center in the Division of Developmental Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital, where he also holds an appointment in the Department of Psychiatry, and is associate professor part time at Harvard Medical School.For most of the 1990s, Dr. Sparrow worked with children hospitalized for severe psychiatric disturbances often associated with physical and sexual abuse, for developmental delays aggravated by social and economic deprivation and environmental neurotoxins, and for behavioral disturbances and emotional distress resulting from the impact of systemic racism on children’s families, schools, communities, identity development, and opportunities. These experiences prompted his interest in the work he has undertaken at BTC since 1999 on the social determinants of health, early relational health, and mental health; community-based learning and mobilization for prevention and health promotion; and professional, organizational, and systems learning, unlearning, and change.

Dr. Dewana Thompson has been a National Trainer with the Brazelton Touchpoints Center since 2011 and is proud to currently serve as the Director of BTC’s National Training Team. She has worked in the field of child, family, and community engagement for 30 years. She is passionate about family engagement and has dedicated her life’s work to supporting parents and families in their role as their children’s first and most important teachers. She has shared her expertise in the field at the local, state, and national levels as a trainer, facilitator, director, research evaluator, and educator.

In her previous roles, Dr. Thompson has provided family engagement training and technical assistance at a national level to 21st Century Community Learning Centers afterschool sites for the U.S. Department of Education; facilitated community partnerships between institutions of higher education and schools to offer families community-based parent education programs and higher education opportunities at the state and regional level; overseen the development and implementation of numerous family engagement resource centers; and supervised family engagement staff at the district level. Dr. Thompson continues to lend her expertise in the field as a National Trainer for Scholastic’s FACE (Family and Community Engagement) Program and Director of Village Consulting Group.