Sharon Wolf, PhD
Associate Professor
Academic positions
I am an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education, and currently a LEAP Fellow with MIT Solve / Jacobs Foundation.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn, I was a postdoctoral research scientist at Global TIES for Children at New York University and a National Poverty Fellow with the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I was in residence at the US Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C.
Education
I received my Ph.D. in Applied Psychology with a concentration in Quantitative Analysis from New York University, and my B.A. in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania.
Teaching
Risk, Resilience & Prevention Science (Fall and Spring)
This course examines the definition and measurement of risk and resilience from the perspectives of developmental psychology and ecological theories of development and introduces students to the conceptual and practical integration of the developmental, intervention, and prevention sciences to address social, emotional, and health problems across childhood.
Poverty & Child Development (Spring)
The goal of this course is to help students develop a coherent understanding of the ways in which poverty affects families and children, and the needs of families and children across different developmental stages of childhood. We examine the impacts of child and youth poverty and related concerns from the perspectives of ecological developmental psychology and social policy, as well as how resilience can be fostered for families and children by program and policy interventions.