Key Researchers

  • Alison Gopnik, Ph.D.
  • Bruce Perry, M.D.
  • Andrew N. Meltzoff, Ph.D.
  • Patricia K. Kuhl, Ph.D.
  • Paul Bloom, Ph.D.
  • Susan Gelman, Ph.D.
  • Harry Chugani, Ph.D.
  • Bruce Wexler, Ph.D.
  • Marilyn Diamond, Ph.D.
  • Charles A. Nelson, Ph.D.
  • Grazyna Kochanska, Ph.D.
  • Stanley Greenspan, M.D. [Late]
  • Gary F. Marcus, Ph.D.
  • Kyle D. Pruett, M.D.
  • Jack P. Shonkoff, M.D.
  • Richard Tremblay
  • Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Ed.D.
  • Jennifer Pfeifer, Ph.D.
  • Carroll E. Izard, Ph.D.
  • Silvia Bunge, PhD
  • Professor Adele Diamond
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Andrew N. Meltzoff, Ph.D.
Co-Director, UW Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences
Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Washington
Job and Gertrud Tamaki Endowed Chair
A graduate of Harvard University, with a PhD from Oxford University, he is an internationally renowned expert on infant and child development. His discoveries about infant imitation have revolutionized our understanding of early cognition, personality, and brain development. His research on the effects of television viewing on infants has helped shape policy and practice.

Dr. Meltzoff's 20 years of research on young children has had far-reaching implications for cognitive science, especially for ideas about memory and its development; for brain science, especially for ideas about common coding and shared neural circuits for perception and action; and for early education and parenting, particularly for ideas about the importance of role models, both adults and peers, in child development.

He is the co-author of two books about early learning and the brain: The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us about the Mind (Morrow Press, 2001) and Words, Thoughts and Theories (MIT Press, 1997). He is also co-editor of The Imitative Mind: Development, Evolution and Brain Bases (Cambridge University Press, 2002), a unique, multidisciplinary volume combining brain science, evolutionary theory, and developmental psychology. 
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Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D.
Founder, Senior Fellow
The Child Trauma Academy  
Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D., is an internationally-recognized authority on children in crisis. Dr. Perry is the Provincial Medical Director in Children’s Mental Health for the Alberta Mental Health Board. In addition, he is the Senior Fellow of the ChildTrauma Academy (www.ChildTrauma.org), a Houston-based organization dedicated to research and education on child maltreatment. Dr. Perry has been consulted on many high-profile incidents involving traumatized children, including the Columbine, Colorado school shootings, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the Branch Davidian siege. 
  • Affective neuroscientist and human development psychologist who studies the neural, psychophysiological and psychological bases of emotion, social interaction and culture and their implications for development and schools. 
  • Assistant Professor of Education, Rossier School of Education.
  • Assistant Professor of Psychology, Brain and Creativity Institute.
  • Member of the Neuroscience Graduate Program Faculty at the University of Southern California, where she was formerly a joint postdoctoral fellow under the mentorship of Robert Rueda and Antonio Damasio. 
A former junior high school teacher, she earned her doctorate at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, where she was the recipient of grants from the Spencer Foundation and the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation. She is the Associate Editor for North America for the award-winning journal Mind, Brain and Education, and the inaugural recipient of the Award for Transforming Education through Neuroscience. She lectures nationally and abroad on the neural and psychosocial implications of brain and cognitive science research for curriculum and pedagogy, and is the content director for a new online, free course for teachers on learning and the brain, funded by the Annenberg Media Foundation (available Fall, 2011; www.learner.org).
PAUL BLOOM is a professor of psychology at Yale University. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on morality, religion, fiction, and art. He has won numerous awards for his research and teaching. He is past-president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and co-editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, one of the major journals in the field.

Dr. Bloom has written for scientific journals such as Nature and Science, and for popular outlets such as The New York Times, the Guardian, and the Atlantic. He is the author or editor of four books, including:
  • How Children Learn the Meanings of Words
  • Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human.
  • How Pleasure Works 
Daniel J. Siegel received his medical degree from Harvard University and completed his postgraduate medical education at UCLA with training in pediatrics and child, adolescent and adult psychiatry.  He served as a National Institute of Mental Health Research Fellow at UCLA, studying family interactions with an emphasis on how attachment experiences influence emotions, behavior, autobiographical memory and narrative.

Dr. Siegel is currently clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine where he is on the faculty of the Center for Culture, Brain, and Development and the Co-Director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center. An award-winning educator, he is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and recipient of several honorary fellowships. Dr. Siegel is also the Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute, an educational organization, which offers online learning and in-person lectures that focus on how the development of mindsight in individuals, families and communities can be enhanced by examining the interface of human relationships and basic biological processes. His psychotherapy practice includes children, adolescents, adults, couples, and families. He serves as the Medical Director of the LifeSpan Learning Institute and on the Advisory Board of the Blue School in New York City, which has built its curriculum around Dr. Siegel’s Mindsight approach.

Grazyna Kochanska, Ph.D.
Psychology Faculty 
University of Iowa
Dr. Kochanska is Professor of Psychology at the University of Iowa, where she conducts research into temperament, conscience development and the role of parenting on children's social development.  She received her MA and Ph.D. from the University of Warsaw, and joined the faculty of the University of Iowa in 1991 as an Associate Professor.  Dr. Kochanska is also a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, a professional organization that promotes a strong scientific orientation in psychology.  Her most recent grant was awarded by the NIMH (9/1/01 - 8/31/06) in support of research on  young children's internalization of moral standards.  
  • Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of Psychology
  • Ph.D. Stanford University
My research interests include cognitive development; language acquisition; categorization; inductive reasoning; causal reasoning; and relationships between language and thought.
Recent Publications
Jack P. Shonkoff, M.D. is the Julius B. Richmond FAMRI Professor of Child Health and Development and founding director of the university-wide Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. He also chairs the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, a multidisciplinary collaboration comprising leading scholars in neuroscience, developmental psychology, pediatrics, and economics, whose mission is to bring sound and accurate science to bear on public decision-making affecting the lives of young children.
 
In 2002, Dr. Shonkoff was honored with a lifetime appointment as a national associate of the National Academies for his extraordinary contributions to the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Shonkoff chaired the Committee on Integrating the Science of Early Childhood Development for the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, and coedited its final report, "From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development." He also served as chair of The Board on Children, Youth, and Families, and as a member of the panel on child care policy, the committee on the assessment of family violence interventions, and the roundtable on Head Start research.

Charles A. Nelson, Ph.D.
Professor of Pediatrics 

Children's Hospital
Director of Research, Developmental Medicine Center
Nelson's research interests are broadly concerned with developmental cognitive neuroscience, an interdisciplinary field that requires expertise in developmental neuroscience and developmental psychology. His specific interests are concerned with the effects of early experience on brain and behavioral development, particularly as such experience influences the development of memory and the development of the ability to recognize faces. Nelson studies both typically developing children and children at risk for neurodevelopmental disorders, and he employs behavioral, electrophysiological (ERP), and metabolic (MRI) tools in his research.
For a complete listing of publications click here.

Professor Richard Tremblay
Richard Tremblay is Professor of Pediatrics, Psychiatry, and Psychology at the University of Montréal, and holds the Canada Research Chair in Child Development. He is also Director of the Research Unit on Children's Psycho-Social Maladjustment, a multidisciplinary research centre funded by Laval University, McGill University, and the University of Montréal. In addition, he is the Director of Health Canada's Centre of Excellence for Early Childhood Development. Dr. Tremblay was a member of CIAR's Human Development Program, which concluded in 2003, and is now a Fellow in the Experience-based Brain & Biological Development Program. 

Dr. Tremblay received his B.A. from the University of Ottawa, his Master's degree from the University of Montréal, and his Ph.D. from the University of London, England. After working for a number of years in clinical settings, he accepted his first position at the University of Montréal in 1971. Dr. Tremblay was Chair of the 2002 World Conference of the International Society for Research on Aggression. He is a member of the U.S. National Consortium on Violence Research, an International Professor at the University of Central Lancastershire in England, and a Special Professor of Interdisciplinary Research at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Dr. Tremblay has been honoured with numerous awards and distinctions including: the 2002 Jacques-Rousseau Interdisciplinary Research Award, the 2003 Royal Society of Canada Innis-Guérin Medal (Social Sciences), the 2004 Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize in the Social Sciences and Humanities, the 2004 Academy of Experimental Criminology Joan McCord Prize, and the 2005 American Society of Criminology Sellin-Glueck Award.

Professor Tremblay's research interests include child development, education, prevention, family, parent-child relations, child psychopathology, aggressive behavior, delinquency, substance abuse.

Professor Adele Diamond

Chair: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience
Department of Psychiatry 
Univ. of British Columbia (UBC) 
The focus of my research is the early development of the cognitive control functions (including cognitive flexibility & inhibition [e.g., selective attention] -- collectively called executive functions) dependent on prefrontal cortex
  • … includes the neuroanatomical, genetic, & neurochemical mechanisms that make those functions possible.
  • … and how these functions are modulated by environment (by detrimental factors such as poverty and by facilitative factors such as early education programs)
  • The roles of storytelling, dance, music, physical activity, and mindfulness in improving executive functions and academic & mental health outcomes
  • Role of Prefrontal Cortex and its Dopamine Projection in Neurodevelopmental Disorders
  • Gender Differences in the Dopamine System in Prefrontal Cortex
  • Development of the Integration of Intention and Action (especially during infancy and preschool)
  • Cognitive & Perceptual-Motor Development, and their Interrelations
  • The Social and Emotional Growth of the Individual in Late Adolescence & Adulthood
My lab integrates behavioral, neuroanatomical, neurochemical, & genetic approaches to study fundamental questions about these abilities, environmental effects on them, and their development throughout the lifespan, but especially in infants, preschoolers, and young school-age children.

Neurodevelopment
Healthy emotional development
Stages of development
Socialization
Brain and learning
Simulation
Theory of Mind
Parenting and nurturing

Developmental Neuroscience Labs

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Alison Gopnik, Ph.D
Professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy: UC Berkeley
BA: McGill University 
PhD.: Oxford University
Dr. Gopnik is an internationally recognized leader in the study of children’s learning and development and was the first to argue that children’s minds could help us understand deep philosophical questions. She is the author of over 100 journal articles and several books including “Words, thoughts and theories” (coauthored with Andrew Meltzoff), MIT Press, 1997,  and the bestselling and critically acclaimed popular books "The Scientist in the Crib" (coauthored with Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl) 1999, and "The Philosophical Baby; What children’s minds tell us about love, truth and the meaning of life", 2009. She has also written widely about cognitive science and psychology for Science, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, New Scientist and Slate, among others.  And she has frequently appeared on TV and radio including “The Charlie Rose Show” and “The Colbert Report”. She has three sons and lives in Berkeley, California with her husband Alvy Ray Smith.


Patricia K. Kuhl, Ph.D.

Dr. Patricia K. Kuhl is internationally recognized for her research on early language and brain development, and studies that show how young children learn. Dr. Kuhl's work has played a major role in demonstrating how early exposure to language alters the brain. It has implications for critical periods in development, for bilingual education and reading readiness, for developmental disabilities involving language, and for research on computer understanding of speech. 

Dr. Kuhl is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Rodin Academy, and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. She was awarded the Silver Medal of the Acoustical Society of America in 1997, and in 2005, the Kenneth Craik Research Award from Cambridge University. She received the University of Washington's Faculty Lectureship Award in 1998, and in the 2007, Dr. Kuhl was awarded the University of Minnesota's Outstanding Achievement Award. Dr. Kuhl is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Acoustical Society of America, and the American Psychological Society. In 2008 in Paris, Dr. Kuhl was awarded the Gold Medal from the acoustics branch of the American Institute of Physics for her work on learning and the brain. 

Dr. Kuhl was one of six scientists invited to the White House in 1997 to make a presentation at President and Mrs. Clinton's Conference on "Early Learning and the Brain." In 2001, she was invited to make a presentation at President and Mrs. Bush's White House Summit on "Early Cognitive Development: Ready to Read, Ready to Learn." In 1999, she co-authored The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, and How Children Learn (Morrow Press). 

Dr. Kuhl's work has been widely covered by the media. She has appeared in the Discovery television series "The Baby Human"; the NOVA series "The Mind"; the "The Power of Ideas" on PBS; and "The Secret Life of the Brain," also on PBS. She has discussed her research findings on early learning and the brain on The Today Show, Good Morning America, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, NHK, CNN, and in The New York Times, Time, and Newsweek.
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Jennifer Pfeifer, Ph.D.
Director
Developmental Social Neuroscience Lab 
University of Oregon
Dr. Pfeifer is interested in the neural and behavioral correlates of self perception, social cognition, and emotion reactivity/regulation from middle childhood to middle adolescence. Her neuroimaging research addresses three broad topics: 

1. examining developmental changes in the neural bases of self-knowledge retrieval, reflected self-appraisal processes, and other forms of self-evaluation such as that implicated in self-conscious emotions, 

2. understanding the development of systems that support advanced perspective-taking and social comparison abilities, as well as the more basic mentalizing mechanisms that facilitate our understanding of other individuals' inner states (including via shared neural representations of our own and others' emotions), and 

3. exploring the interplay between networks that react to emotions and those which regulate them, especially as influenced by pubertal development. 

Dr. Pfeifer has been involved for several years with an ongoing longitudinal study of adolescent brain development. This large dataset (N ~ 90 children in the initial wave) includes structural and functional MRI data, resting EEG, salivary assessments of sex steroid hormones, neuropsychological and behavioral assessments, and more. Dr. Pfeifer has a growing interest in autism research, particularly in the neural bases of their developing self-evaluations, as well as self-conscious emotion processing and emotion regulation. She and her graduate students actively collaborate with Drs. Berkman, Fisher, Moses, and Dishion.
Gary F. Marcus, Ph.D. is Director of the NYU Infant Language Learning Center, and Professor of Psychology at New York University.
 
Author of The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates The Complexities of Human Thought, The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science, and editor of The Norton Psychology Reader, Gary’s research on developmental cognitive neuroscience has been published in over forty articles in leading journals such as Science, Nature, Cognition, Cognitive Psychology, and the Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.
 
In 1996 he won the Robert L. Fantz award for new investigators in cognitive development, and in 2002–2003 Gary was a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Social and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. His 2008 book Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind was a New York Times Editor’s Choice.

Kyle D. Pruett, MD 
Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Nursing, served as Director of Medical Studies at the Yale School of Medicine's Child Study Center, where he received the Lifetime Distinguished Teaching award. He also helped found the Performing Arts Medicine Association, and has been in the private practice of infant, child and family psychiatry since 1974. 

As president of Zero to Three: The National Center for Infants, Toddlers and their Families, he headed one of the nation's most prestigious multi-disciplinary training programs for infant/family professionals. Both clinician and scholar, Dr. Pruett conducted a landmark study, which demonstrated the powerful, positive impact which early caregiving by fathers can have on a young child's social and intellectual development. Dr. Pruett's writings (including the classic The Nurturing Father, winner of the American Health Book Award, and more current Fatherneed: Why Father Care is as Essential as Mother Care for Your Child and Me, Myself and I: The Child's Sense of Self, which won the Independent Book Publisher's Award), frequent contributions to national and international print and electronic media, and television appearances have provided countless parents with useful information and guidance on early childhood development and effective parenting practices. He serves as consultant to NBC Dateline, ABC News, CBS Morning News, National Public Radio, PBS National Advisory Board, and Sesame Workshop, was chosen by Peter Jennings to co-host the Children's Town Meeting on ABC News the Saturday after 9/11, and by Oprah Winfrey to co-host with her the award winning video for new parents, Begin With Love.

Dr. Pruett is affiliated with the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Society for Research in Family Therapy, World Association for Infant Mental Health, the Yale University Program for the Humanities in Medicine, and the Annenberg Center for Public Policy in the Media. With his wife Marsha Kline Pruett, he is co-investigator in the Collaborative Divorce Project to reduce the trauma of divorce in young children's lives, co-author of Partnership Parenting: How Men and Women Parent Differently-Why It Helps Your Children and Can Strengthen Your Marriage, and the prestigious on-going, multi-site abuse and neglect prevention study, Supporting Fatherhood Initiative for California's Department of Social Service, Office of Child Abuse Prevention.

Carroll E. Izard
Trustees Distinguished Professor
University of Delaware

Human Emotions Lab
Emotional development
In the Human Emotions Lab, we study emotions, indexed by a wide variety of procedures, in relation to the development of emotion knowledge, emotion regulation, social and emotion competence, personality, and behavior problems. The theoretical notion that drives our work is that the emotions are central in motivating and organizing perception, cognition, and action.

Much of the current research in the lab concerns the development of emotion knowledge, emotion regulation, and key components of emotion competence. A principal goal of our research is to develop a scientific basis for emotion-based intervention programs that prevent behavioral disorders and facilitate the development of social and emotion competence.

A relatively new activity in the lab consists of translating research into practice--clinical, school, and community programs. Based on differential emotions theory and findings from basic research in our lab and others, we have constructed an emotion-centered prevention program for preschool children, particularly children at risk for behavior problems and psychopathology.  

Current graduate students have presented at SRCD and APA and are authoring or coauthoring several papers. For example, some of these papers showed that a child's ability to detect emotion signals and understand the causes of emotion feelings was associated with indexes of the child's emotion competence and academic competence. 

Harry Chugani, Ph.D.
Harry Chugani, M.D., the Rosalie and Bruce Rosen professor of Neurology and chief of Pediatric Neurology for the Wayne State University School of Medicine and Children’s Hospital of Michigan, has edited a new book detailing the breakthroughs in imaging in the study and treatment of epilepsy.

Dr. Chugani, who also serves as director of the Positron Emission Tomography Center for the School of Medicine and Children’s Hospital of Michigan, edited “Neuroimaging in Epilepsy,” a compilation of every imaging technique used to study the condition by world experts in the field.
Dr. Bunge uses behavioral and brain imaging techniques to examine how we control our thoughts and actions to make them consistent with our internal goals. Her goals are to elucidate the mechanisms underlying control processes, as well as to characterize the nature of the contributions of the prefrontal cortex and associated brain regions to cognitive control, in children and adults.

The Bunge lab’s three main lines of research: 1. The impressive array of human cognitive abilities arises from interactions among a set of core mental processes, just as a complex structure can be built from simple pieces. We design experiments to isolate some of these core processes.  

2. Cognition is ‘built’ as the brain matures. We are engaged in a large study tracking the neural changes that underlie the emergence of high-level cognition across ages 6-19. In addition to studying typically development, we conduct research involving children with focal brain damage or Tourette Syndrome.

3. Experience influences how the brain is ‘built’, and how it functions throughout life. We are currently studying experience-dependent brain plasticity in young adults, examining whether and how changes in mental habits can alter brain function. We seek to extend this research to the study of brain plasticity in children.