Jennifer Keys Adair, Ph.D. is the Priscilla Pond Flawn Regents Professor of Early Childhood Education and the Director of the Agency and Young Children Research Collective at The University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Adair works with parents, teachers, administrators, and children to improve children's learning experiences (not just outcomes), with a particular focus on how inequity can be a significant barrier to agency. Trained in video-cued ethnography and early childhood education, Dr. Adair conducts large-scale qualitative studies across national and global contexts. She is a former Young Scholars Fellow with the Foundation for Child Development, a major grant recipient of the Spencer Foundation to study civic action and racial justice, and most recently a multi-year grant recipient from the Brady Foundation to culturally validate and test the Markers of Agency tool, a capacity-building, culturally flexible reflection tool rooted in 10 years of agency research and racial justice in multiple nations, languages and communities. Dr. Adair is the author, along with co-author Dr. Kiyomi Sánchez-Suzuki Colegrove, of the book, Segregation by Experience: Agency, Racism and Early Learning (The University of Chicago Press, 2021) which won the 2021 Council on Anthropology and Education Outstanding Book Award and the 2021-2022 Book Study Award from the High Scope Educational Research Foundation. Her new book on supporting children's agency will be published by Beacon Press in Summer 2026.

Dr. Adair has received many awards for her research and published findings in a wide range of journals including Harvard Educational Review, Teachers College Record, Journal of Teacher Education, Race, Ethnicity and Education, Urban Education and Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education. She teaches courses on qualitative research with young children, the impact of sociopolitical/cultural factors on development and a range of early childhood and research methods courses. Dr. Adair served as a special issue editor for both Anthropology and Education Quarterly and Bank Street Occasional Papers. She has served on multiple editorial boards for journals and book series, including for Teachers College record (2017-current) and Anthropology and Education Quarterly (2016-2020) and is currently a Co-Editor of AERA Open. She has served on advisory boards for multiple educational, philanthropic organizations, foundations, and research groups. Jennifer works to make her research public by speaking at venues such as SXSW as well as through public media coverage including CBS, NBC, Washington Post, NPR, New America, Code Switch, Huffington Post, EdWeek, and The Conversation.