Jessica R. Toste is an Associate Professor in the Department of Special Education at The University of Texas (UT) at Austin. She holds research affiliations with the Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk and Texas Center for Equity Promotion; and is a fellow with the IES-funded Research Institute for Implementation Science in Education (RIISE). Her research is focused on methods for intensifying intervention for students with persistent reading challenges and reading disabilities, and she is principal investigator on research grants from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Toste was trained in reading intervention research as a postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt University and as a Fulbright scholar at the Florida Center for Reading Research, Florida State University. She has worked as an elementary special education teacher and reading specialist in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Dr. Toste is associate editor for the Journal of Learning Disabilities and a principal member of the reading, writing, and language development grant review panel for the Institute of Education Sciences. She is an award-winning teacher; she was the recipient of a 2023 President's Associates Graduate Teaching Excellence Award, 2022 Dean's Distinguished Teaching Award, and was named one of the 2017 "Texas 10" professors at UT Austin. She is current Chair of the Graduate Assembly and Immediate Past Chair of the Provost's Teaching Fellows Program at UT Austin, as well as current President of CEC's Division for Learning Disabilities, and Vice-President for CEC's Division for Research. Dr. Toste is engaged in advocacy as a member of the Board of Directors for GLSEN, a leading national organization focused on LGBTQ+ issues in K-12 education, and as Past Chair of the Board of Directors for Disability Rights Texas, the federally designated legal protection and advocacy agency for people with disabilities in Texas.