Developmental Science 
Across the Lifespan

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Core Research Initiatives

To facilitate our collaborative efforts, we have organized our research activities into core initiatives. Each initiative will seek primary funding through the National Institutes of Health and other appropriate external funding sources. Currently, the core initiatives are:

•  Developmental Pathways: Contextual Influences on Biological and Psychological Change
•  Developmental Interventions: Enhancing Health and Development across the Lifespan
•  Developmental Research and Policy: Promoting Societal Change
•  Developmental Impacts: Individual, Family, and Community Influences

The goal is for new hires to complement and extend the current expertise of faculty members in Human Development and Psychology. A key hire will be a developmental methodologist, who will work collaboratively with current faculty and graduate students in developing more sophisticated research designs that capture developmental processes. More specifically, we will seek a methodologist who is trained to address unique theoretical and practical issues pertaining to developmental research design and analyses (e.g., longitudinal designs, nonindependent data, structural equation modeling, multilevel hierarchical linear modeling, times-series analysis).

Further, our goal is to identify and recruit four other outstanding researchers to promote excellence across the core initiatives. Our vision is that all new hires will have joint appointments in departments and centers. We would focus on attracting developmental researchers with interests in key areas such as social cognition, gerontology, socioemotional regulation, developmental psychopathology, family development, and adolescent development. The following list outlines a suggested set of responsibilities for these joint positions:

•  Teach graduate courses for students in the Departments of Human Development and Psychology;
•  Consult with students and faculty on the development of interdisciplinary proposals (particularly questions related to longitudinal design and developmentally-sensitive methods and analytic approaches);
•  Collaborate on funded projects and coauthor scholarly publications;
•  Conduct a program of research and scholarly dissemination related to her or his specialties.

The proposed joint positions are an investment in both a cross-departmental research program, and in the promise of excellent interdisciplinary research between the Departments of Human Development and Psychology in the future. This investment should pay big dividends in the years to come.