Speakers Bureau

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Upcoming Events

Conversations, Grand Rounds, Presentations, and Workshops on Babies, Children, Families, Communities, and Cultures 

Are you interested in bringing one of the Brazelton Touchpoints Center’s internationally sought-after experts to your organization or community? Our faculty are available for keynotes, plenaries, and workshops, in person or virtually. Keynotes and plenaries are typically 1 to 1 ½ hours long, and workshops can be scheduled for half-day or full-day sessions as needed.

If you work with newborns, babies, young children, or teens, and their families, contact Suzanne Otcasek to find out how you can bring one of our speakers to work with your group on areas such as:

  • birth equity and reproductive justice
  • culturally affirming approaches to child and family development
  • development and developmental delays
  • early relational and infant and parent mental health
  • family and community engagement
  • mental models and unsticking stuck systems
  • organizational learning and change
  • promoting positive cultural and racial identities
  • race, racism, and racial equity in education, health care, and social services
  • social-emotional development in the early years
  • trauma-informed care and healing-centered engagement
  • whole family, whole community substance use disorder recovery

Meet Our Faculty


Eurnestine Brown, PhD

Picture of Eurnestine Brown

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

Sampling of Dr. Brown’s recent talks:

  • Elevating Our Journey to Becoming Anti-Racist: Embracing Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Belonging, and Access (EDIBA)
  • Thriving in the Midst: Centering Pediatric Health Equity
  • Developmental and Early Relational Belonging in Our Communities: Centering Racial Identities in Children and Families
  • Centering Black Joy and Excellence with our Children, Families, and Communities.​
  • Allyship and Racial Healing

Jayne Singer, PhD

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Jayne Singer, Ph.D., 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. She 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. Dr. Singer’s expertise is reflected in her array of speaking engagements for professionals and parent audiences on topics including child development, trauma, neurodevelopmental disorders, early relational health, family engagement, and infant mental health and clinical practice.

Sampling of Dr. Singer’s recent talks:

  • Foundations of Infant Mental Health
  • Advanced Clinical Concepts: Infant Behavior as Cross-Cultural Language
  • Supporting Early Childhood Coping and Resilience
  • The Brazelton Touchpointsâ„¢ Approach: Developmental, Relational, and Trauma Frameworks for Understanding and Addressing Children’s Behavior
  • Nurturing the Whole Family in Recovery: Hope in the Face of Adversity
  • Developmental, Relational, and Mental Health Frameworks for Understanding and Addressing Post-Partum Depression and Early Parenting
  • The Critical Importance of the Early Years: Foundations of Social-Emotional Health
  • Emotional Competence
  • Supporting your Child When They Experience Anxiety
  • Early Detection of Autism
  • Touchpoints of Special Needs
  • Your Baby is Speaking to You!
  • Developmental, Social-Emotional, and Trauma Frameworks for Strengthening Learning Readiness
  • Developmental Processes as Family-Engagement Opportunities
  • Infant Mental Health: A Case Study in Clinical Practice
  • From the Beginning: Understanding Infant and Toddler Development in the Context of Family and Culture
  • Environments and Relationships to Support Children’s Development
  • A Developmental-Relational Framework for Healing Trauma
  • Essential Elements of Infant Assessment
  • The Newborn Behavioral Observations in the Context of Substance Exposure and Recovery
  • A Developmental-Relational Framework to Enhance Mental Health Practice

Joshua Sparrow, MD

Photo of Joshua Sparrow

Joshua Sparrow, M.D., DFAACP, is executive director of BTC 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 and mental health; community-based learning and mobilization for prevention and health promotion; and professional, organizational, and systems learning, unlearning, and change.

Sampling of Dr. Sparrow’s recent talks:

  • Adolescent Touchpoints:  Keeping Parents and Teenagers Connected
  • Changing Mental Models, Changing Systems for Cross-Sector, Family and Community Engagement, Racial Equity, and Healing
  • The Childhood Obesity Epidemic and How We Can Help Our Children
  • The Child with Special Needs – How Families Learn to Cope
  • Is Yours a Learning Organization?
  • Mental Models, Systems Change: Family and Community Approaches to the Opioid Epidemic
  • Opportunities for Healing: Strengths-Based, Culturally Affirming Approaches to Trauma-Informed Care of Young Children and Their Families
  • Partnering with Families and Honoring Cultures for Children’s Flourishing
  • Pregnancy, Infant Development, and the Earliest Relationships: Beyond Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome to Family Recovery
  • Raising Children with Kindness to Grow Up to Be Kind Adults
  • Scalable Solutions to the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Epidemic: Mental Health Promoting Activities, Environments, Practices, and Policies
  • Strengthening Partnerships with Families and Communities
  • The Shared Experience of Observation: Deepening Our Understanding, Empathy, and Trust for Infants and Young Children
  • The Touchpoints of Development and Emotional Development in the Early Years
  • Touchpoints: A Developmental and Relational Model for Working with Infants, Children, and  Families
  • Trauma, Historical Trauma, and Healing
  • Using Culturally Responsive, Trauma-Informed Practices to Partner with Families and Communities through the COVID-19 Pandemic
Get Involved

Learn With Us

Babies and children, families and communities do the research on what it takes for them to flourish. Listen with us to what they’ve been learning. Watch a webinar. Check out the Indigenous Early Learning Collaborative. Join the Brazelton Touchpoints Center Learning Network. Join the conversation.

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