Sharon Ramey

Watch the full Reading Rockets webcast, From Babbling to Books: Building Pre-Reading Skills, featuring Ramey, Todd Risley, and Julie Washington discussing research-based strategies for developing language and pre-reading skills in young children.

Biography

Dr. Sharon Ramey and her husband Dr. Craig Ramey have published almost 500 scientific manuscripts and many books, including several on early child brain and behavior development that have won numerous national awards, such as Right from Birth and Going to School. They are principal investigators on research grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Education, and private foundations.

Ramey came to Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute in 2011 from Georgetown University in Washington D.C., where she was the co-founding director of the Georgetown University Center on Health and Education.

At Georgetown, Ramey was the Susan H. Mayer Professor of Child and Family Studies in the School of Nursing and Health Studies at Georgetown University, professor of psychiatry in the School of Medicine at Georgetown University, and the founding director of the Science of Effective Early Childhood Education Program at Georgetown. She directed large scale multi-site randomized controlled studies of child development and leads a study of constraint therapy, a novel approach to treating children with cerebral palsy.

Previously, as a faculty member at the University of Washington in Seattle, Ramey did pioneering research on fetal alcohol syndrome. She joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as director of the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, then became the founding co-director of the Civitan International Research Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she led major national and international research programs on maternal and child health as well as community outreach in early childhood education.

Learn more at Dr. Ramey’s website.