She received her Ph.D. in Experimental Child Psychology from Brown University and, is a professor and Program Director of Liberal Studies: Pre-Teaching and Child Studies at Santa Clara University. Together with her students and collaborators, Dr. Burns has developed a community parenting program called the ‘Resilient Families Program’ (RFP). RFP is based on the science of resilience and consists of six psycho-educational workshops designed to strengthen children’s executive function skills and parent-child attachment through daily family routines and games and increase feelings of parent mastery and stress management through introduce mindfulness and compassion exercises.