If child development research is your business, no special interest is being overlooked in Denver, Colorado’s “Mile-high City," this week. The biennial conference of the Society for Research in Child Development is intentionally multidisciplinary and covers every aspect of human development, but this time sharper focus is being given to services and interventions for children and their families, to evaluations of these services and methods for taking programs to scale.

So, in choosing from an agenda encompassing molecular genetics, HIV prevention, resilience in primates and syntactic bootstrapping, we are able to concentrate on some core Prevention Action concerns, including economic returns on early childcare programs, school-based randomized controlled trials, and a profile of "the father of Head Start".

Tomorrow, we report on a symposium chaired by Arthur Reynolds, an influential figure in the field of prevention and economics. His presentation on the economic returns of early childcare programs is likely to be particularly pertinent to the times, given the catastrophic impact of the credit crunch.

Coverage continues on Monday with a report on randomized controlled trials that have been evaluating three school-based prevention interventions. The session is chaired by Celene Domitrovich from the Prevention Research Center at Penn State University and Catherine Bradshaw from the John Hopkins Center for Prevention of Youth Violence.

It will be followed next Tuesday by a profile of the father of Head Start and a passionate lobbyist for early childhood education initiatives, Edward Zigler, who is attending an invited symposium on science and public policy. Zigler is a Sterling Professor of Psychology at Yale and former Director of the Edward Zigler Center on Child Development and Social Policy.

Coverage concludes on Wednesday with highlights from the presidential address, to be given this year by Arnold Sameroff. He is Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan and Director of the Development and Mental Health Research Program at the Center for Human Growth and Development.

That part of the proceedings is traditionally an opportunity to recognize leaders in the field of child development for their distinguished contributions to science and policy.