Spotlight on Faculty Research: Center for Human Development

Farrell Ackerman
Farrell Ackerman is a professor in the Department of Linguistics. Recently, he has been working on the description and theoretical analysis of an underdocumented Kordofanian language, Moro, spoken in Sudan. Read more about Farrell Ackerman

Mark Appelbaum
Mark Appelbaum is a professor in the Department of Psychology. His interests involve the application of quantitative and data analytic methods to a wide variety of problems in psychology and the behavioral sciences. Read more about Mark Appelbaum

Leslie Carver
Leslie Carver is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology. She studies the brain basis of cognitive and social developmental change in the transition from infancy to the early toddler years. Read more about Leslie Carver

Christina Chambers
Christina Chambers is an associate professor at the UC San Diego School of Medicine. She is a specialist in environmental causes of pregnancy complications and childhood developmental disabilities. Read more about Christina Chambers

Michael Cole
Michael Cole is a professor in the Department of Communication and he is Director of Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition. For the past decade, he has been engaged in a large, and growing, analysis of a large number of special "microcultures" designed to promote the intellectual and social development of children. Read more about Michael Cole

Sarah Creel
Sarah Creel is an assistant professor in the Department of Cognitive Science. She explores how children and adults learn and process complex acoustic information, especially words, and also other types of temporally-patterned stimuli such as music. Read more about Sarah Creel

Gedeon Deák
Gedeon Deák is an associate professor in the Department of Cognitive Science. His research interests include cognitive flexibility and its development in childhood, infant-parent communication and joint attention, and word learning in children. Read more about Gedeon Deák

Gail Heyman
Gail Heyman is a professor in the Department of Psychology. She has interests in both social and cognitive development. Her research examines how children make inductive inferences, from several different perspectives. Read more about Gail Heyman

Terry Jernigan
Terry Jernigan is a professor in the Department of Psychiatry. Her research employs magnetic resonance imaging and cognitive activation paradigms in studies of brain maturation and brain aging, CNS effects of HIV-infection, and neural effects of substance abuse. Read more about Terry Jernigan

David Liu
David Liu is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology. His primary research goal is to understand the development of social concepts and how one reasons about causes of people's actions. Read more about David Liu

Carol Padden
Carol Padden is a professor in the Department of Communication. She has been involved in the study of sign language, particularly American Sign Language (ASL), and she has explored ways in which language forms are created, propagated, and conventionalized in natural environments. Read more about Carol Padden

Nicholas Spitzer
Nicholas Spitzer is a professor in the Division of Biological Sciences. He has studied activity-dependent regulation of expression of serotonin and dopamine in the embryonic brain, because the transmitters have broad impact on cognitive states and on behavior. Read more about Nicholas Spitzer