Celebration of Innovation & Entrepreneurship
2025 Startup of the Year: Parent Heart
In the best of situations, parenting is hard.
When you add in any combination of challenges, from parenting children with special needs to parenting through poverty, or struggling against racial bias, or operating as a single parent, it can be overwhelming.
James “Jay” Huguley’s academic career has been dedicated to exploring and validating optimal parenting practices for African American families, as well as developing school-based interventions and policies that can improve educational and mental health outcomes for Black youth.
When a curriculum he designed under the name Parenting While Black achieved remarkable results in pre- and post-administration surveys in a 2021 pilot with local agencies, Huguley turned his thoughts to how to scale up the intervention.
Today, he is the CEO of Parent Heart, a startup he launched to make a real-world impact with his research. For the 2025-26 academic year, he has taken a partial leave from his academic duties to pursue funding for the company and expand its online resources, while continuing to develop curricula for broader audiences.
For his dedication to achieving societal benefit through commercial translation, Huguley and Parent Heart have been selected as the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship’s Startup of the Year for 2025.
Following the Road Less Traveled
Coming from the social sciences, Huguley had few role models to draw from when it came to starting a company. In fact, the Pitt School of Social Work has produced only one other startup, and that was over a decade ago.
That doesn’t mean he felt like he was in completely unfamiliar territory when he first considered commercializing his curriculum.
Before earning his master’s and doctorate degrees from Harvard and entering academia, Huguley was on the front lines of helping children and families, first as a middle school teacher and later as a leader of a nonprofit service provider in Rhode Island. He said a lot of his experience has equipped him to fill some of the roles and mindsets necessary to build a successful new venture.
“So much of what I already naturally do translates directly into business development. When you’re doing research in sociology and psychology, you are thinking about what motivates people and thinking about how to deliver compelling messaging that resonates with your target audiences,” he said. “I’m also a trained schoolteacher. I’m in sales whether I like it or not.”
He also said his work co-leading a nonprofit required him to become adept at raising money.
Taking the Leap
When he was ready to dip his toes into commercialization, Huguley applied for the Pitt Innovation Challenge (PInCh), previously hosted by the Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute.
After winning a PInCh grant, he began working with the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship’s (OIE) Innovation Institute to protect his intellectual property via copyrights.
Over the past year and a half, he has been a Fellow of the Pitt EI3 (Empowering Innovation, Incubation and Impact) program designed to bring people from historically excluded backgrounds into the university’s innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem.
“OIE has provided me with amazing mentoring support,” Huguley said. “It has been an amazing learning process for me, and I’m still learning every day.”
He said that different people from the OIE’s New Ventures team have stepped in at different points along his journey to provide timely and targeted support for the relentless onslaught of decisions a startup CEO has to make.
“The whole team has been great. Priya (entrepreneur in residence Priya Amin), Paul (director of New Ventures Paul Petrovich), Cecelia (director of the EI3 program Cecelia Yates) and Peter (executive director, commercialization strategy Peter Allen) have opened up a new world of opportunities and have provided invaluable insight into how to pitch my work to customers and investors,” he said.
Amin said several factors contributed to selecting Huguley and Parent Heart as the OIE Startup of the Year. She said that the unmet need the company is addressing by bringing research-validated solutions to help parents in challenging environments is inspiring.
“Parent Heart is creating a more just and equitable world through the dissemination of research-backed racial education and training. Jay and his team have done an outstanding job of getting this important asset into the hands of those who need it the most,” she said.
Making a Difference
Numerous Pittsburgh regional schools and nonprofits have adopted Parent Heart’s curriculum into their operations.
Stephanie Romero, executive director of Awaken Pittsburgh, which provides mindfulness education to students, educators, social service, public safety professionals and others, said her organization has integrated Parenting While Black into its Mindfulness Connections for Families initiative, which supports Black families in the Hill District and Homewood neighborhoods, as well as a collaboration with the Clairton School District, engaging families to strengthen social-emotional skills and support the school success of elementary-aged children.
One parent participant commented about the program in a post-training focus group, “It helped me slow down and not just instantly react…(I) think about what I’m going to say before I say it, instead of just reacting helped a lot. ”
Other places that have piloted the curriculum include Clairton School District, Neighborhood Academy, Bible Center Church, Macedonia Family and Community Enrichment Center, and Homewood Children’s Village.
“Over the last two years, we’ve worked closely with Dr. Huguley and the Parent Heart team to provide parallel programming for parents and children during our family nights. Through this partnership, we’ve served more than 80 families. Their programming has opened parents’ eyes to new approaches and created a real sense of community. Kids now have a space to talk about their unique struggles in ways they might not have elsewhere. It’s been truly impactful for everyone involved,” said Walter Lewis, president and CEO of Homewood Children’s Village, a nonprofit seeking to break down barriers to economic success in PIttsburgh’s Homewood neighborhood.
Finding the Strength to Persevere
Almost all entrepreneurial journeys have days when it feels like they have reached the end of the road.
“I have those moments with some regularity,” Huguley admitted.
What allows him to push through in those times of doubt and despair is the unrelenting passion he feels to make an impact.
“It’s daunting, but with the risk comes excitement,” he said. “It’s very mission-driven. Helping parents attain the tools to be successful, no matter the challenges they are facing, that’s exciting and meaningful work.”
In addition to the OIE staff, Huguley said his department has been gracious in allowing him to reduce his academic load this year as he devotes more time to his company. He also credits his faith and his support network of friends and colleagues who have encouraged him, along with his wife, who he said is “willing to take these risks with me.”
“I’m giving this the full effort and wherever it goes, I’ll be glad to look back and say I didn’t hold anything back,” he said.
Huguley said he encourages his colleagues in the social sciences to explore the commercial potential of their research. He said some find the idea of a profit motive distasteful, but he said in many cases, the commercial market is the most efficient and cost-effective way to reach people who can benefit from social science research.
“Much of the research we do doesn’t make it to a general audience,” he said. “We too often write for publications that only other researchers read. (Commercialization) is an opportunity to expand what our impact can be.”
“Commercialization is a standard pathway in the physical and medical sciences. I think there is a way if we can communicate similar pathways for faculty in disciplines like social work and in education, so that they can expand their reach and impact in a way that is sustainable for their work. Foundation and government support can change or shift, so commercial translation can be a more enduring model.”
