Ron Dahl is a pediatrician and developmental scientist who has devoted more than 30 years to interdisciplinary team research to improve the lives of children and adolescents. This work has focused on basic science studies of child and adolescent development, behavioral/emotional health in youth, sleep and arousal regulation, adolescent brain development, and the clinical, public health, and policy implications of this work. A major focus of his current research is bringing a developmental science perspective to advance understanding of both the vulnerabilities and opportunities being created by rapid changes in the ways that information technology is influencing learning and development. He serves as the Director of the Institute of Human Development; and Professor in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. Ron is also the Founding Director of the Center for the Developing Adolescent and former President of the Society for Research in Child Development.

Rucker C. Johnson is the Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy in the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.  As a labor economist who specializes in the economics of education, Johnson’s work considers the role of poverty and inequality in affecting life chances.

Johnson was inducted as the Sir Arthur Lewis Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, inducted as a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the National Academy of Education, and received the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. His research has appeared in leading academic journals, featured in mainstream media outlets, and he has been invited to give policy briefings at the White House and on Capitol Hill. He is the author of the book Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works.

Johnson is committed to advance his scholarly agenda of fusing insights from multiple disciplinary perspectives to improve our understanding of the causes, consequences, and remedies of inequality in this country. Johnson earned his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Michigan. At UC-Berkeley (2004-present), he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in applied econometrics and topical courses in race, poverty & inequality.

Emily J. Ozer is a Professor of Community Health Sciences at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. Professor Ozer teaches graduate courses in behavioral science theory, mental health, community interventions and program evaluation. Her research interests include school-based health promotion and prevention programs, post-traumatic stress disorder and community-based participatory research. She is particularly interested in how the school and classroom contexts in which prevention programs are implemented affect outcomes. Her current research involves a multi-method study of the impact of an empowerment-oriented participatory research intervention on adolescents attending San Francisco public schools.

Stephen Hinshaw is Professor of Psychology at the UC Berkeley, and Vice Chair for Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at the UC San Francisco. He received his B.A. from Harvard and his doctorate in clinical psychology from UCLA. His work focuses on developmental psychopathology, clinical interventions, and mental illness stigma, with specialization in ADHD.  Hinshaw has authored over 300 publications plus 14 books, including The Mark of Shame: Stigma of Mental Illness and an Agenda for Change (2007), The Triple Bind: Saving our Teenage Girls from Today’s Pressures (2009), (with R. Scheffler) The ADHD Explosion: Myths, Medications, Money, and Today’s Push for Performance (2014), and (with K. Ellison), ADHD: What Everyone Needs to Know (2015). He is editor of Psychological Bulletin, and a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Alison Gopnik is a professor of Psychology and affiliate professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley. She received her BA from McGill University and her PhD. from Oxford University. She is a world leader in the study of children’s learning and development. She is the author or coauthor of over 100 journal articles and several books including Words, thoughts and theories, The Scientist in the Crib,  The Philosophical Baby; What children’s minds tell us about love, truth and the meaning of life, and The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the new science of child development tells us about the relationship between parents and children. She writes the “Mind and Matter” column for the Wall Street Journal, and has written widely about cognitive science and psychology for Science, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Scientific American, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, New Scientist and Slate. 

Mahesh Srinivasan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and a member of the Cognitive Science Faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Harvard University in 2011. On campus, Dr. Srinivasan directs the Language and Cognitive Development Laboratory, which uses empirical methods to explore how linguistic, cognitive, and social abilities arise and interact with one another during human development and across different cultures. Dr. Srinivasan’s work has been published in numerous journals, including Cognition, Cognitive Psychology, and Developmental Science, and is supported by the National Science Foundation.

Linda Wilbrecht is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at UC Berkeley where her research lab focuses on lab how experience alters neural circuits that contribute to value and reward based decision making. Her research goals include understanding how early life experience with unstable environments, stress or drugs of abuse might alter or limit human potential. She is particularly interested in mechanisms that regulate sensitive periods for neural plasticity and how these map onto the maturation of frontal cortical-striatal circuits. Through better knowledge of neural plasticity and sensitive period regulation in frontal circuits, she hopes to identify strategies to facilitate change in neural circuits and promote healthy decision making.

Margaret Bridges is a Developmental Psychologist and Research Scientist at IHD. She is leading the effort to build the new Early Development & Learning Science Program at UC Berkeley, a transdisciplinary, developmental science program focused on young children from the prenatal period to age 8. Dr. Bridges studies how family and preschool experiences influence the socio-emotional development and early academic skills of young children, as well as how families can be supported to prepare their young children for school.

Dr. Silvia Bunge directs the building Blocks of Cognition Laboratory, which draws from the fields of cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, and education research.  Research in the laboratory examine the neural basis of improvements in high-level cognitivie functions (reasoning, memory, and self-regulation) over childhood and adolescence.  This research on typical brain development serves as a foundation of the lab’s research on children with brain injury or neurodevlopmental disorders. Professor Bunge’s team conducts intervention research in children and adults in an effort to develop effective ways to promote cognitive skill development and subsequent academic achievement. Finally through the Frontiers of Innovation, Professor Bunge partners with practitioners to conduct intervention research with young children at high risk for school failure.

Dacher Keltner is a professor at UC Berkeley and director of the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab (http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~keltner/.) and faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center (http://greatergood.berkeley.edu). Dacher’s research focuses the biological and evolutionary origins of compassion, awe, love, and beauty, emotional expression, and power, social class, and inequality.  Dacher is the co-author of two textbooks, as well Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, The Compassionate Instinct, and The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence.  Dacher has published over 190 scientific articles, he has written for the New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and The London Times, and has received numerous national prizes and grants for his research. 

Carolyn Cowan is Professor of Psychology, Emerita at UC Berkeley, where she is co-director of 3 longitudinal preventive intervention projects: Becoming a Family, Schoolchildren and Their Families, and Supporting Father Involvement. She consults widely on the development and evaluation of interventions for parents. Dr. Cowan is co-editor of Fatherhood today: Men’s changing role in the family (Wiley, 1988) and The family context of parenting in the child’s adaptation to school (Erlbaum, 2005), and co-author with Phil Cowan of When partners become parents: The big life change for couples (Erlbaum, 2000). Carolyn was a founding member of the Council on Contemporary Families.

Philip A. Cowan is Professor of Psychology, Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, where he served as Director of the Clinical Psychology Program and the Institute of Human Development. In addition to authoring numerous scientific articles, he is the author of Piaget with Feeling (Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1978), co-author of When partners become parents: The big life change for couples (Erlbaum, 2000), and co-editor of four books and monographs, including Family Transitions (Erlbaum, 1990) and The family context of parenting in the child’s adaptation to school (Erlbaum, 2005). Phil was a founding member of the Council on Contemporary Families.

Emma Armstrong-Carter is a postdoctoral scholar. She is a quantitative developmental psychology researcher. She researches children's and adolescents' experiences helping and caregiving for family - and how these experiences relate to their school success. She is particularly interested in how children's experiences supporting the family can either exacerbate or mitigate academic challenges in homes with family disability, chronic illness, or socioeconomic disadvantage. Her research is trans-disciplinary and integrative. It lies at the intersection of developmental psychology, education policy, community health, and data science. She addresses multiple contexts of development including family, school, neighborhood, and geographic processes. Her work informs the design of school- and government-based policies that support children’s wellbeing and educational success.  Please contact her at emmaac@berkeley.edu.

Krithika Jagannath is a postdoctoral scholar at the Institute of Human
Development (IHD) at UC Berkeley. She is on a mission to help design
developmentally appropriate virtual playgrounds for young adolescents,
particularly between ages 7 and 14. Her research is situated at the
intersection of the allied disciplines of Human-Computer Interaction
or HCI, Developmental Science, and Games Research. She leads the
research of Experience Craft, a virtual play-based program within
Minecraft and Discord for young adolescents who are grieving.
Experience Craft is a research-practice partnership between two
youth-serving organizations – Experience Camps and Connected Camps,
and IHD. Her dissertation was focused on the design features and
governance mechanisms in kid-friendly servers in Minecraft. Krithika
earned her PhD in Informatics at the University of California, Irvine
and a Master’s degree in the Learning Sciences at Harvard University.
She is a part of the Connected Learning Lab and CERES scholar network
at UC Irvine. Her research aims are two-fold – i) to inform the design
of socio-technical systems within virtual playgrounds for adolescents,
and ii) to help advance evidence-based research in Developmental
Science and HCI.

Lucía Magis-Weinberg is an Assistant Professor in Psychology at the University of Washington. She leads the interACTlab (International Adolescent Connection and Technology Laboratory). Her research focuses on how the social and affective developmental tasks of adolescence have been transformed by the digital era—particularly in understudied populations in international settings. Her lab collaborates with schools in Latin America to advance knowledge on adolescent development and technology use, and also apply developmental science to design school-based interventions to promote digital citizenship and healthy digital habits. 

She received her MD from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and her PhD in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience from University College London. She was a postdoctoral researcher at IHD and part of the Adolescent Research Collaborative at UC Berkeley, and continues to collaborate with IHD to promote adolescent development. 

Jennifer Skeem is a clinical psychologist and professor in the Goldman School of Public Policy. Her specializations include mental health, criminal behavior and intervention/policy.

Her research is designed to inform clinical and legal decision-making about people with emotional and behavioral problems. Specific topics include identifying factors that improve outcomes for offenders with serious mental illness, understanding psychopathic personality disorder and promoting prosocial behavior among juveniles at high risk for violence. 

Merging her background in developmental psychology and applied linguistics, Laura Sterponi has advanced a research program that is centrally concerned with the role of language and literacy practices in children's development and education. Sterponi is drawn to study language, oral and written, both as a central means of learning and as a critical target of cultural transmission. Her work thus explores the interface between cognition and culture in communicative practices across learning contexts. Sterponi has developed a strand of research on language in childhood autism, which further explores the cognitive and interactional underpinnings of language development.

Luvy Vanegas-Grimaud is the ED&LS Research Coordinator at IHD. She is an adjunct professor in the Department of Child Development at Merritt College, in Oakland, California, and is actively involved in various international teacher trainings. She is dedicated to helping early childhood educators become teacher researchers.    

Fei Xu is a Professor of Psychology who studies probabilistic inference, physical reasoning, psychological reasoning, word learning, causal learning, and social cognition.  She investigates whether infants and young children are active learners; whether internal processes such as analogy and explanation play a role in how children take into account their environmental input; whether young learners show fine grained sensitivities to probability and how they use probabilistic information in statistical inference; how probability is related to other quantitative reasoning abilities; how agency may be construed using probabilistic evidence; and how children decide who to learn from when majority opinion conflicts with other sources of information. 

Qing Zhou is an Associate Professor in Psychology at University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on understanding how cultural, family, and other contextual factors shape children’s self-regulation, psychopathology, and academic development in ethnic minority and immigrant families in the U.S. and families in Asia. Dr. Zhou’s team is currently working on: a) a longitudinal study on mental health, socio-emotional, and academic development of Chinese American children from immigrant families; b) a study on bilingual and socio-emotional development in preschool-age children from Spanish- and Chinese-speaking homes; and c) a study on teacher influences on children’s emotional competence in preschool/pre-K classrooms.