Dr. Esposito earned her B.I.D. in Industrial Design from North Carolina State University, College of Design. Her program of study focused on educational material design. She then earned an M.A.T. in elementary education at East Carolina University and went on to teach elementary school, including within a bilingual education program. She completed her Ph.D. in Lifespan Developmental Psychology at North Carolina State University and went on to a postdoctoral research fellowship at Emory University. She joined the Clark faculty in 2018.

Dr. Esposito is a developmental scientist with a focus on cognitive development. Her research concentration is malleable factors influencing learning and subsequent academic achievement, especially for emerging bilingual students. The current application of her research is in dual-language education, where she is examining cognitive and academic outcomes for both language minority and majority students. As part of this project, she is also investigating the process of building a knowledge base both within and across languages with the long-term goal of informing educational policy and practice. This investigation entails examining the encoding and manipulation of semantic memory as well as conceptual representation across languages. The work is inherently interdisciplinary and includes both laboratory and classroom work.

Dr. Esposito is currently teaching courses on cognition and lifespan development.