Dr Shannon Bennetts is a social scientist with a focus on supporting and understanding the needs of parents, children and families. Her research interests include children's language, social and cognitive development, parenting during social adversity, parent and child mental health, work-family conflict and enrichment, and the role of social media in contemporary parenthood and for use in research. To date, much of her work has focused on measurement, observational data collection and data management, computer-assisted telephone interviews, study protocols and home-based parent and child assessments. Dr Bennetts has worked on a number of large research projects, including the Early Home Learning Study a cluster randomised controlled trials evaluating a program for vulnerable Victorian families, which aims to support parents to facilitate their young children's language and literacy development and school readiness. She is currently the Project Coordinator for the EHLS at School Study a school-age follow-up of the Early Home Learning Study.

Dr Bennetts recently completed her PhD with The University of Melbourne, based at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute. Her thesis examined "Parent-reported and directly measured child language and parenting behaviours: Agreement, socio-demographic factors and parent perspectives".