Dr. Essie Sutton

About Essie Sutton, Ph.D. 

Dr. Sutton is an Applied Developmental Psychologist and the Director of Learning Science at Branching Minds. Her work brings together the fields of child development and education psychology to improve learning and development for all students. Dr. Sutton is responsible for studying the impacts of the Branching Minds platform on students’ academic, behavioral, and social-emotional outcomes. She also manages and curates the platform’s library of evidence-based supports and studies how different strategies, programs, and tools impact students’ educational outcomes.

Dr. Sutton received her Ph.D. in Applied Developmental Psychology from Fordham University, where her research focused on evaluating academic and social-emotional learning programs in elementary classrooms. Her work has also examined how classroom contexts and the quality of teacher-student interactions influence students’ learning and social development. She has also developed and studied assessments used to measure indicators of children’s well-being and teachers’ classroom practices. Dr. Sutton’s research has been published in Child Indicators Research and the Journal of Applied Developmental Science. She has also presented her work at national conferences, including the American Education Research Association and the Society for Research on Child Development. Dr. Sutton also has an M.A. in Human Development, Learning, and Culture from the University of British Columbia and a B.A. from McGill University.