Taletha Mae Derrington

Taletha Mae Derrington is a senior researcher at AIR with over 25 years of experience in research and technical assistance (TA) projects focused on child and family health, development, and well-being. She is currently leading the Healthy Students Learn Better component of Promoting Equity Funding for Schools Facing Adverse Health Circumstances to develop school environmental health practice guides based on input from local leaders in historically marginalized communities. Derrington also leads data infrastructure and quantitative analyses for randomized controlled trials, longitudinal secondary analyses, and evaluations in early childhood special education, social emotional and literacy development, and classroom teaching environments. She provides educational social determinants of health and maternal and child health subject matter expertise to AIR’s Center for Addiction Research and Effective Solutions.

Derrington volunteers with Sea Hugger® and the Surfrider Foundation to protect our oceans and disseminate tools for climate and environmental justice. Previously, Derrington was an early childhood researcher at SRI International, where she developed and deployed a web-based TA tracking relational data system for a national early childhood special education TA center. As a senior program manager at the Boston University School of Public Health, Derrington managed CDC- and National Institutes of Health-funded projects. Derrington’s work enhanced a population-level, linked data system, and she used it to create two measurement algorithms and complete epidemiologic studies on the impacts of perinatal substance use disorder on birthing persons and their infants, racial equity in hospital care for infants and toddlers with Down syndrome, and fetal deaths and birth defects.