Editorial Committee
Sandra R. Waxman, Co-Editor
Louis W. Menk Professor of Psychology
Department of Psychology
Northwestern University
Sandra Waxman is a cognitive psychologist specializing in three key research areas: How language and cognitive development unfold from the first months of life, how children learn, for better or worse, about social bias, and how children across cultures learn about the natural world. She holds a joint appointment in the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences and the School of Education and Social Policy.
Waxman’s research in early linguistic and conceptual development employs both developmental and cross-linguistic designs, engaging infants from birth through the preschool years. This is essential in discovering the origin of infants' early capacities, identifying which might be universal, and specifying how these are shaped by infants’ experience with their native language(s). Her recent work on social bias reveals that even before they enter school, young children are exquisitely sensitive to the racial and gender biases evident in the world around them. Waxman’s cross-cultural work explores how notions of the natural world unfold—across development, across cultures, and across languages, exploring fundamental questions, including: What is the place of humans within the natural world? What does it mean to be “alive”? In all three research arenas, Waxman’s research helps to unravel the basic mechanisms behind how we learn. In illuminating the importance of early experience, her work offers insights into promoting positive developmental outcomes in all children.
Waxman is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Psychological Association, Association for Psychological Science, and the Cognitive Science Society. In 2007, she received a James McKeen Cattell Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a founding executive committee member of Northwestern’s Institute for Innovations in Developmental Science (DevSci). Earlier, she co-founded Northwestern’s program in Culture, Language, and Cognition. She has been a research fellow of the Spencer Foundation and the National Academy of Education, a visiting research fellow at the Institute for Cognitive Science in Lyon, France, and a visiting professor at Harvard University and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
Avshalom Caspi, Committee Member
Duke Center for Genomic and Computational Biology
Duke University
Avshalom Caspi, Ph.D., is the Edward M. Arnett Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke University, and Professor of Personality Development at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, & Neuroscience, King’s College London. His expertise is in longitudinal methods, developmental psychology, personality assessment, life-course epidemiology, and genomics in behavioral science.
Dr. Caspi grew up in Israel. He attended the University of California, Santa Cruz for his undergraduate degree and completed his Ph.D. at Cornell University. He worked in (West) Berlin, and served on the faculty at Harvard and the University of Wisconsin before moving to London and then Duke.
For his research, Dr. Caspi has received both the American Psychological Association's Early Career Contribution Award and Distinguished Career Award. Dr. Caspi was also awarded a Royal Society-Wolfson Merit Award, and was a recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the International Society for the Study of Behavioural Development, the Mortimer D. Sackler MD Prize for Distinguished Achievement in Developmental Psychobiology, the NARSAD Ruane Prize for Outstanding Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Research, and the Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize for Productive Youth Development.
He holds an honorary doctorate from Tilburg University, The Netherlands. He is involved in international teaching and training initiatives in developmental psychopathology.
Greg J. Duncan, Committee Member
Distinguished Professor
School of Education
University of California, Irvine
Greg Duncan is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Education at the University of California, Irvine and an adjunct faculty member at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. His current research projects include an examination of how children's early skills and behaviors relate to later-life outcomes, and a meta-analysis of the impacts of early childhood intervention programs. In addition, Dr. Duncan is a member of the interdisciplinary MacArthur Network on the Family and the Economy. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and the National Academy of Education in 2009. He served as president of the Population Association of American in 2007-2008, and currently is the president of the Society for Research in Child Development. Dr. Duncan has published extensively on issues of income distribution, child poverty and welfare dependence. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan.
Nathan A. Fox, Committee Member
Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology
University of Maryland, College Park
Nathan A. Fox is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology. He conducts research on the effects of early experience on brain and behavioral development in infants and children. He has studied the biological bases of social and emotional behavior developing methods for assessing brain activity in infants and young children during tasks designed to elicit a range of emotions. His work is funded by the National Institutes of Health where he was awarded a MERIT award for excellence of his research program. He is one of three Principal Investigators on the Bucharest Early Intervention Project.
Dr. Fox was awarded the Distinguished Scientific Investigator Award from the National Association for Research in Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD) and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Psychological Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a founding member of the National Scientific Council for the Developing Child.
Diane Hughes, Committee Member
Beatriz Luna, Committee Member
Department of Psychology
University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
Dr. Luna is the Staunton Professor of Psychology at the University of Pittsburg. Her research is on brain mechanisms that support the transition to adult-level cognitive control of behavior. She is interested in understanding the link between cognitive development and brain maturation to better understand the constraints of maturation. Current directions for her research include characterizing developmental changes in reward processing and the emergence of functional networks. She is the 2005 recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and a member of the American Psychological Society, the Society for Neuroscience, and the Association for Academic Minority Physicians.
Elliot Tucker-Drob, Committee Member
Janet F. Werker, Committee Member
Department of Psychology
University of British Columbia
Dr. Janet F. Werker is University Killam Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia.
Dr. Werker is the founder and a member of the Early Development Research Group, a consortium of six research centers interested in the development of language, learning, and social understanding in infants and children.
Werker is internationally recognized for her research investigating the perceptual foundations of language acquisition in both monolingual and bilingual learning infants. Her over 150 papers and chapters, have appeared in prestigious journals including Science, Nature, Nature Communications, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Neuroscience, Psychological Science, and Cognition as well as in the premier journals in developmental psychology, language, and perception. Her research is funded by NSERC, SSHRC, and CIFAR in Canada, and by the NIH in the U.S. Previous funding sources include the Human Frontiers Science Program, the James S. McDonnell Foundation, and NTT Laboratories.