Adolescent Research Collective
The Adolescent Research Collaborative seeks to bring together several disciplinary perspectives to promote a more integrative understanding of the science of adolescent development. This includes adolescent specific advances in: developmental social and affective neuroscience, the science of learning, developmental psychology, the social determinants of health and well being, anthropology, and most importantly scientific advances in how to leverage these advances in relation to clinical, educational, public health, social policies, and to improving the social systems and organizations aiming to support learning and development of youth. Crucially, this also includes the importance of bringing an equity lens that recognizes the many ways that the critical positive learning opportunities must be made more available to all youth during these formative periods of development–in the US and globally.
One of our most dynamic areas of research is focusing on emerging understanding of the vulnerabilities and opportunities being created by the rapidly expanding role of technology in the daily lives and learning experiences of youth throughout the world.
In particular, our work is providing growing evidence that early adolescence represents a window of opportunity for positive impact—as a formative period of social learning and social identity development, in ways that raise compelling questions about the ways technology is influencing these learning experiences. Examples of past (and ongoing) work addressing these issues includes: Discover Learning (a project in Tanzania supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation); Transitions (a project focusing on technology use in young adolescents in partnership with Innova Schools in Peru and Mexico).
Currently, we are working in close collaboration with the CERES Research Network supported by a generous gift from the Jacobs Foundation. Two current post-doctoral fellows Krithika Jagannath and Emma Armstrong-Carter are working on projects related to this network, focusing on ways that technology can promote prosocial learning in early adolescence.
Our adolescent research collaborative is also working closely with the Center for the Developing Adolescent and the National Scientific Council on Adolescence. The CDA was founded in IHD as a collaboration across several universities and currently resides at UCLA. The mission of the Center focuses on promoting public and policy understanding of the science of adolescence. The Podcast (Adaptivity) is hosted by Ron Dahl at UC Berkeley.
Research Projects:
Leadership Team
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.
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.
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.
Megan Cherewick is an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado School of Public Health with expertise in Child and Adolescent Health, Mental Health and Wellbeing, Emergency Preparedness and Response, Refugee Health, Global Health.