Dr. Benner received her PhD in education from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2007. After that, she completed a one-year postdoctoral research position in Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She then completed a NICHD-funded Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA postdoctoral fellowship at the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin). She is currently a Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences at UT Austin. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Education, the William T. Grant Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the Foundation for Child Development.

Dr. Benner’s substantive research interests center on the development of low-income and race/ethnic minority youth, investigating how social contexts influence experiences of marginalization and discrimination, school transitions, and developmental outcomes during adolescence. As a developmental psychologist, the core of her research program is a fundamental developmental question—what are the continuities and changes in the social, emotional, and cognitive growth and maturation of young people? Reflecting her training in educational demography, she works to answer this question with an awareness of how such developmental patterns are embedded in the groups, contexts, and social structures of society. Specifically, her research falls into two primary streams: race/ethnicity and social class as developmental contexts and the influence of multiple and shifting ecological contexts in young people’s lives. Her studies have examined adolescents’ perceptions of discrimination, their experiences of numeric marginalization tied to both race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status, experiences of school transitions across the early life course, and how schools, families, and peers independently and conjointly influence young people’s well-being. Her current research focuses on  discrimination tied to race/ethnicity, social class, sexual minority status, and weight and linkages to disparities in mental and physical health and academic achievement.