Laura Justice is also the Executive Director of Ohio State's EHE college-level centers, such as the Schoenbaum Family Center, a network of community partners that provides information on early childhood programming and family engagement, and the Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy. The Crane Center is a nationally recognized institution that brings together a diverse network of research organizations dedicated to improving children's development in areas such as education, well-being, health, language, literacy, and school readiness.
Justice's professional career began at the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education, where she was an Assistant Professor in the Reading Education Program before becoming an Associate Professor with Tenure.
Early research by Justice focused on how parents of children with speech delays interacted with their children during story time. According to her findings, parents' questions about books they had read to their children tended to focus entirely on pictures rather than print. Her doctoral dissertation, "An experimental evaluation of an intervention to stimulate written language awareness in preschool children from low-income households," was the catalyst for a literacy intervention research program.
Justice has been the Principal Investigator (PI) or Co-PI of more than $55 million in federal research funding over the last decade. Her research is currently supported by the Spencer Foundation, the Institute of Education Sciences, the National Institutes of Health, the United States Department of Education, and others.