The Developmental and Biological Psychology (DBP) graduate program is dedicated to training today's students as tomorrow's premiere academics: individuals who will contribute to the future growth of psychological science in research and teaching. To this end, the DBP program provides graduate students with experiences within the research domain, the classroom, and scholarly interactions to expand their specific expertise in areas that are related to developmental and biological issues in Psychology. Students are highly encouraged toward activities that help them to develop their own unique research programs so that they can advance understanding in their areas of inquiry as their careers unfold.
Our current faculty provide training in a multitude of areas, including: brain dynamics of cognition and attention; essential processes that affect infant perception, cognition, and socialization; family and peer relations; adaptive and maladaptive developmental pathways; psychophysiology of emotion and personality; cardiovascular reactivity; joint genetic and experiential contributions to cognitive, social, and emotional development; developmental changes in brain-behavior relations; developmental psychophysiology of attention; emergence of multimodal processing in infants' perception of language; cultural influences in development. The program embraces varied conceptual orientations (e.g., maturational; dynamic systems; behavioral genetics) and different levels of analysis (e.g., idiographic; nomothetic; cross sectional; longitudinal; growth curves and path modeling).
DBP graduate students are also given many opportunites to establish themselves as effective educators. They are invited to teach introductory psychology recitation sections, laboratories, and/or undergraduate courses during the academic year and summer sessions, with a special focus on courses that are relevant to their own research interests and career goals. They also have ample opportunities to mentor and supervise undergraduate students in their research programs.
We welcome your inquiries into our program, so please feel free to contact the interim area director (Dr. Bruce Friedman) or any of our affiliated faculty for more information.
Dr. Bruce Friedman
Department of Psychology
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg VA 24061-0436
540-231-9611
bhfriedm@vt.edu