Sara Gable

Sara Gable has been engaged in practical and scholarly activity focused on children, families, and child care since the 1980s. In 1986, she completed an undergraduate internship at Syntex Corporation’s employee child care program in Palo Alto, CA. During her master’s degree studies, she was a lead teacher at Utah State University’s Child Development Lab and conducted extensive in-home observations of mothers and their babies across the first year of life. At Penn State, her PhD research involved naturalistically observing first-born toddlers in two-parent homes before, during, and after dinner to characterize the co-parenting relationship. Upon completing her PhD, she was a post-doctoral project coordinator for a federally funded child abuse prevention demonstration project at the University of Missouri. From 1996 to the present, she has been on the faculty at the University of Missouri in Human Development and Family Studies and, more recently, as an associate professor and extension specialist in the Department of Nutrition and Exercise Physiology. During her tenure, she has conducted research with the child care workforce, created and taught educational programs for child care providers, and served on numerous local and state agency advisory boards related to child care. She also conducts research on the etiology and outcomes of childhood obesity and is currently working to integrate her child care and child health research.