Our team

Patricia Brooks is a Professor at CUNY College and Graduate Center. Patricia investigates how features of child-directed speech promote language learning, including caregiver repetitions and expansions of child utterances at the transition to combinatorial speech.

Danielle Matthews is a Professor at the University of Sheffield. She studies how infants and young children learn from experience to use words and grammar in a  communicatively effective way. She is interested in the role of social contingency in communicative development.

Kaitlyn Campbell is a doctoral student at Temple University in the developmental psychology area. Her research interests include the intersection between attention, executive function, and social contingency in early childhood. 

Katie Eulau is a doctoral student at Temple University investigating connections within caregiver-child interaction and language development with particular interests in social contingency and facilitative contexts for early language development.

Annette Henderson is an Associate Professor at the University of Auckland. Annete researches the development of linguistic and non-linguistic cooperative behaviour in infancy and early childhood and role of social contingency in shaping one's social partner’s behavior across multiple modalities. 

Lindsay C. Bowman is an Assistant Professor at UC Davis. She uses a combination of neuroscientific and behavioral methods to illuminate developing cognition and pathways to adaptive and maladaptive social behavior across infancy and childhood.

Sam Wass is a Professor at the Univerity of East London. Sam investigates the development of attention control and arousal control. He also asks how caregiver-infant interactions and their everyday environments influence how attention and arousal states develop.

Brittany Manning a Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University. Brittany investigates how synchronous parent-child interaction supports language and cognitive development in infancy and toddlerhood, and how it may improve outcomes in children at risk for language and mental health disorders. 

Jessica Kosie is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University. Jessica's research explores how infants’ complex, dynamic communicative input impacts their learning and development, focusing on communicative interactions between infants and their caregivers in everyday lives. 

Jill Lany is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Liverpool. Jill's research focuses on mechanisms supporting early language development. She investigates how referential understanding is achieved within early interactions, including those involving social contingency.

Rachel Albert an Associate Professor at Lebanon Valley College. Rachel invesitgats the components of the caregiver-infant interaction that promote language development, such as the impact of infants’ vocal cues on parents and educators contingent responding. 

Brianna McMillan is an Assistant Professor at Smith College. Brianna's research focuses on how cognition and context shape children’s learning, with an emphasis on understanding the natural sources of variability that shape language development, such as social interactions. 

Marisa Casillas is an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago. Marissa explores the co-development of interactional and linguistic behaviors, particularly in conversational communication, across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. 

Meghan Miller in an Associate Professor at UC Davis. She uses a developmental psychopathology framework to understand the early emergence of neurodevelopmental disorders, with a particular focus on autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and ADHD.

Arkadiusz Białek is an Assistant Professor at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. He investigates cultural learning, the development of social cognition, and preverbal communication, focusing on developmental change in caregiver-infant interactions.

Elizabeth (Liz) daSilva is an Assistant Professor at Indiana University-Purdue University Columbus. Liz investigates how social contingency and physiological synchrony contribute to the emergence of individual differences in nonverbal communication and emotion regulation.

Trinh Nguyen is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology. Trinh investigates when, how and why bio-behavioral synchrony emerges in early social interactions and conducts research on turn-taking over the lifespan.

Nicholas Smith is an Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri. He investigates bidirectional, dyadic interactions between caregivers and children, how children's feedback shapes caregiver's behavior, and how temporal coordiantion in such interactions predicts developmental outcomes.

Sandy Waxman is a Professor at Northwestern University. Sandy's research focuses on infants’ and young children's natural ability to build complex, flexible, and creative systems, including concepts, words, and reasoning. She adopts a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective in addressing these questions.

Fei Xu is a Professor at UC Berkeley. Fei investigates cognitive and language development from infancy to early childhood, including learning about probabilities, word learning, and social reasoning. Fei developed a rational constructivist approach to cognitive development.

Isabella Stallworthy is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies neurobiological underpinnings of social interactions, focusing on dynamic processes through which brains, physiology, and behavior coordinate and specialize to support social learning.

Tonya Piergies is a PhD Student at UC Davis. Tonya investigates how parent-child synchrony and social contingency relate to communicative and self-regulation development, especially in infants with a family history of autism and ADHD.

Stefanie Hoehl is Professor at the University of Vienna. She is interested in how children learn with and from other people. She also investigates neural and behavioral synchrony in social interactions and functionality of neural rhythms in early development.

Martin Zettersten is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Princeton University. Martin investigates how children's active information-seeking strategies interact with contingent responses from the environment, especially in the context of language development.

Morgane Jourdain is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Zurich. She explores how adults simplify their speech in contingent compared to non-contingent child-directed speech, and how this simplification interacts with the typological properties of languages.

Gina Mason is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Alpert Medical School. Gina is interested in how caregivers' contingent responses impacts attention and cognitive development, and how differences in caregiver sleep disruption influence patterns of dyadic social responsiveness and reactivity to infant behaviors. 

Nastassja L. Fischer is a Research Fellow at Cambridge-NTU Centre for Lifelong Learning and Individualized Cognition. She investigates learning from statistical regularities and how exploratory behavior, cognitive flexibility, and social interactions contribute to this process.

Elena Guida is a PhD Student at the University of Milano-Bicocca. Elena researches socio-cognitive development, focusing on parents’ and infants’ affective perception and biobehavioural features related to interpersonal contingencies during dyadic and triadic interactions.

Catherine Tamis-Lemonda is a Professor at New York University. She examines infants’ moment-to-moment behaviors of gestures, object play, vocal productions, and locomotion, and how the active infant elicits contingent responses from caregivers that support learning. 

Gideon Salter is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Sheffield. He investigates the developmental origins of joint attention and communication in infancy, and relations between early caregiver-infant interactions and infants' emerging language use.

Rachael W Cheung is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of York. Rachel examines how caregiver-child interactions affect word learning and language development and investigates developmental pathways across different social contexts.

Malerie McDowell is a Research Assistant at Emory University. Malerie assists in data collection for infants at high risk and low risk for ASD. Her work investigates visual correlates of perceived salience as infants with and without ASD engage with their caregivers.

Joshua Schneider is a PhD Student at the University of Pittsburgh. Joshua explores (1) how infants learn new motor skills in exploring their surroundings and interacting with caregivers and (2) how caregivers’ communication changes with the emergence of new motor skills.

Xi Jia Zhou is a PhD Student at Stanford University. XiJia's reserach investigates infant attachment, the elements of social contingency in sensitive care, and how social contingency impacts curiosity and exploration in infants. 

Anne Warlaumont is an Associate Professor at UCLA. Anne's research focuses on human infant vocal learning, considering among other factors the role of contingent social responses between infants and adult caregivers.

Ben Morris is a PhD Student at the University of Chicago. Ben's research focuses on the development of interactional skills and expectations (e.g., turn-taking in conversation), and how social contingency shapes that development. 

Nina-Alisa Kollakowski is a PhD Student at LMU Munich, investigating the development of an implicit self in infancy and how parents' contingent responsiveness to their infants, contributes to that development. 

Narain Viswanathan is a PhD Student at the University of East London. Their research focuses on mimicry ontogeny and the role that contingent feedback (both social and the perception of one's own behaviour) might play in its development.

Elaine Smolen is an Assistant Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. Elaine investigates spoken language learning strategies in children with hearing loss and parent-child interaction routines that can improve language learning outcomes.

Katarzyna (Kasia) Chawarska is a Professor at Yale School of Medicine. Her research aims to identify neural signatures of ASD during fetal, neonatal, and school-age period and test the efficacy of novel interventions targeting early markers of autism. 

Sara Schroer is a PhD Student at UT Austin. Sara investigates social and sensorimotor influences on early language acquisition, such as patterns of parent-infant interactions, and how such patterns create opportunities for real-time word learning. 

Sara Sanchez-Alonso is a Research Scientist in Haskins Labs at Yale University, studying on how language-related neural systems develop over time and how they may contribute to early diagnosis of developmental disorders. 

Miriam Lense is an Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University. Miriam's research focuses on rhythm and timing of social engagement in individuals with and without neurodevelopmental disorders including autism and Williams syndrome.

Victoria Mousley is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Birkbeck, University of London. Victoria's research focuses on the role of interpersonal neural and behavioural synchrony in the development of collaborative problem-solving in children.

Aiden Ford is PHD Student at Emory University, exploring data-driven methods to measure contingency over long timescales and how contingency between the infant-caregiver dyad supports neurobehavioral development and learning.  

Amanda Brandone is an Associate Professor at Lehigh University. She examines the developmental mechanisms of conceptual learning in infancy and early childhood and the role social contingency plays in conceptual development.

Kelsey West an Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama. Kelsey’s research focuses on the synchrony between infants’ motor actions and caregivers language input, both in neurotypical and autistic infants. 

Michael Goldstein is a Professor at Cornell University. Michael's research examines the role of contingent responsiveness in in the development and evolution of communication in human infants and songbirds.

Olivia Boorom is a PhD Student at the University of Kansas. Olivia explores the measurement of emerging language skills, including language comprehension, and factors that impact reciprocity during social interaction with children with autism.

Anja Gampe is a Postdoctoral Scientist at Duisburg-Essen University and a Deputy Professor at the University of Bremen. Anja investigates how children learn social skills in interactions, how they interact with their partners, and which factors influence these two processes.

Yu (Tina) Chen is a PhD student at the University of Maryland. Her research explores how children’s early experiences at home, such as dynamic and reciprocal interactions between infants and their mothers and fathers, shape language and cognitive development.

Nils Tolksdorf is a PhD Student at Paderborn University. Nils investigates the role of contingency  in interactions between children and artificial social interaction partners (robots), as well as the influence of individual differences in children's temperament.

Caitlin Fausey is an Assistant Professor at the University of Oregon. Caitlin's research aims to build theories and models of experience-dependent development by examining infants’ everyday lives at home and quantifying  everyday sensory histories in vision, music, and language.

Katie Lancaster is a PHD Student of the Baby Development Lab at the University of East London. Katie is interested in exploring the neural pathways through which unpredictably contingent caregiver behaviours affect  development.

Juan Giraldo-Huertas is a Professor at the University of La Sabana. His researh focuses on helping children in difficult socioeconomic conditions. He develops intervention programs to boost cognitive development through parent-child interactions.

Yasmine Elasmar is a PhD Student at New York University. Yasmine explores how infants' motor skills adapt through interactions with their environments, and how individual differences correlate with varying experience levels.

Heather Anderson is a PhD Student at the University of Oregon. Heather studies how everyday parent-child interactions, like grooming, mealtime, and book-reading, influence the development of language and executive functioning over time.

Youtao Lu is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Tokyo University. He explores how social contingency differs from more mechanically-termed contingency, such as spatial-temporal contingency, and how (social) contingency by itself can contribute to children's development.

Anna Bánki is a postdoctoral researcher at the Technical University of Dortmund. She investigates the neural basis of visual development in children and infants, including the neural dynamics involved in attention and perception processes during social interactions.

Emily Britsch is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Washington. Her research examines parent-child interactions, language and communicative development, and early intervention for children with autism.

Katharina J. Rohlfing is Professor of developmental psycholingustics at the Paderborn University investigating multimodal social interaction, especially the process of scaffolding the interaction partner, and how robotic partners can achieve it. 

Sarah Shultz is an Assistant Professor at Emory University. She examines how mutually-adapted and mutually-reinforcing infant-caregiver interaction shapes emerging skills in infancy and the developing brain, using novel computational approaches to quantify early interactive differences in infants with and without autism.

Jeremy I. Borjon is an Assistant Professor at the University of Houston. His research investigates how cognitive achievements such as sustained visual attention and language development emerge in the context of a growing and changing body and the surrounding social environment.

Anika van der Klis is a postdoc researcher at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on early language development, including infant gestures and caregiver responsiveness. I'm particularly interested in behavioural and physiological measures of synchrony.

Ellen Roche is a PhD student at University of Maryland, College Park. She studies caregiver-child interaction across brain (fNIRS) and behavior as context for children's early emotional development.

Juan Giraldo-Huertas is an Associate Professor of Developmental and Educational Psychology at Universidad de la Sabana, Colombia. Juan's research focuses on children's developmental potential. He employs dialogical book-sharing and parental monitoring, parent-report tools, home-based records, and simulations using Artificial Intelligence supported agents.