Beth Rous is a Professor of Educational Leadership Studies, College of Education at the University of Kentucky. She is also a Research and Policy Associate and founding director of the Kentucky Partnership for Early Childhood Services at the Human Development Institute at UK.

Beth’s work has focused on helping state and local agencies who serve vulnerable populations design, scale, and sustain programs and services.  This work has focused on areas such as transition and school readiness; professional training, coaching, credentials and competencies; accountability, standards, and assessment systems; online and hybrid learning; and team development, collaboration and leadership.  Her research agenda focuses on the methods to design and prototype of innovations in education.

Since 1989, Beth has secured over $97 million dollars in grants and contracts to support her research and professional interests. She has served as PI on numerous national centers and grants including the National Early Childhood Transition Research Center (PI; USDOE), CONNECT: National Center to Enhance the Training of Personnel (Co-PI: USDOE); State Preschool Accountability Research Collaborative (PI: USDOE) and PD Framework Research Collaborative (PI: ACF, CCB). Through this work she led teams of researchers on studies related to the transition of children to school; faculty and PD resources; national guidelines for public preschool accountability systems; and the impact of a state PD framework on program quality and child outcomes across child care, Head Start, and public pre-k programs.