She holds a joint appointment at the Merrill Palmer Skillman Institute for Child and Family Development where she serves as the Associate Director of the Infant Mental Health Program. Her research is focused on early parenting processes with an emphasis on fathering in urban settings. She has many years of experience providing clinical interventions to the families of infants and young children in a wide range of settings including home-based, center-based, and hospital programs. Dr. Dayton’s program of research is fundamentally translational and transdisciplinary; it is informed by her clinical work with families and aims to identify biological and psychosocial risk and resilience factors that influence early parenting process and early child development.