The Department of Comparative Human Development (CHD) is an interdisciplinary program at the critical edge of thought and research in the social sciences, examining what it means to be human during a contemporary moment marked by rapid social, technological, and ecological change; massive global movements of people and ideas; and wide-ranging forms of inequality. Faculty and students in the Department conduct interdisciplinary, holistic and comparative research and scholarship focused on individual lives within various, changing, and heterogeneous contexts. Drawing on methods and concepts from anthropology, biological and developmental psychology, educational research, sociology, and statistics, Department members are committed to examining humans as simultaneously sociocultural, biological, and psychological beings who change over developmental and historical time. Such perspectives make CHD a unique space for research addressing topics including difference, equality, and power in multicultural societies; the developmental, symbolic and embodied processes involved in learning and socialization; the social shaping of vulnerability and resilience in relation to shifting categories such as gender, race, class, age, sexuality, and ability, among others. Faculty and graduate students conduct research in both US and non-US settings using diverse methods including long-term participant observation, qualitative interviewing, analysis of survey data, experiments, classroom observation, and field research with non-human animals.