The 2024 Early Childhood Innovation Summit

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The HeadStarter Network is hosting the 2024 Early Childhood Innovation Summit from August 5-7 at the Zions Bank head office in Salt Lake City, Utah. The two-and-a-half-day event will gather leading experts from technology, academia, health, and early childhood education to explore innovative solutions for 21st-century challenges.

"Early childhood education stands at a pivotal point, requiring innovative strategies to meet modern challenges. This year’s Early Childhood Innovation Summit will showcase a distinguished group of thought leaders whose work in learning and development aims to advance thinking on the pressing issues impacting young learners and their environments," said Board Member of the Headstarter Network and Executive Director of the National Head Start Association (NHSA) Yasmina Vinci. "This is our ninth Summit, and it remains one of my favorite annual events. This is a rare opportunity to bring together over 100 researchers, technologists, policymakers, and practitioners, all dedicated to empowering early learning educators, enhancing early childhood development, and fostering a brighter future for all children."

The Summit will begin with a keynote address by Dr. Dana Suskind, founder and co-director of the TMW Center for Early Learning and Public Health, and founding director of the Pediatric Cochlear Implant Program at the University of Chicago. Dr. Suskind will discuss her recent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, "The AI Nanny in Your Baby’s Future," which explores the increasing exposure young children have to AI, its known and unknown impacts on brain and language development, and the crucial role of early learning providers and caretakers in shaping these interactions.

Speakers include Rachel Robertson, chief academic officer at Bright Horizons; Dr. Christina Kundrak, senior research associate at University of Southern California's Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning, and Education (CANDLE); Dr. Pamela Truelove-Walker, director of Early Childhood Education Strategy at TMW Center; Isabelle Hau, executive director, and Reuben Thiessen, learning technologist from the Stanford Accelerator for Learning; Janell Cerva, chief impact and strategy officer at Utah Community Action; Leah Hairston from the National Black Child Development Institute; Deidra Vachier and Sandra Genzel from Allentown Community Services for Children; and Maritza Raimundi-Petroski and Silvia Corado from the Children’s Home Society of New Jersey.

This year’s event will also feature a tour of Utah Community Action’s Central Kitchen, a Salt Lake City-based social enterprise that provides healthy meals to children in Head Start and other community programs year-round.

The Headstarter Network is a nonprofit network created to provide a nimble, interdisciplinary, and forward-looking engine for driving innovation in early childhood education. The Network seeks to apply best practices and innovations from technology, business, science, and academia to deliver new approaches and models to the field.

A practitioner-focused think and action network, the HeadStarter Network is supported by staff of the National Head Start Association (NHSA), and governed by a board that is majority-led by Head Start alumni. Learn more at HeadStarterNetwork.org.