Faculty

Margaret Beale Spencer

Chair

Contact Oliver Garland, Research and Administrative Assistant

Margaret Beale Spencer is the Marshall Field IV Professor of Urban Education, and is an alumna of the Committee on Human Development. Before returning to Chicago, she was the endowed Board of Overseers Professor and Director of the Interdisciplinary Studies of Human Development (ISHD) faculty member in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Additionally, she was Director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Health Achievement Neighborhood Growth and Ethnic Studies (CHANGES), and also guided as its inaugural director, the W. E. B. Du Bois Collective Research Institute.

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Jennifer Cole

Jennifer Cole's work addresses the substantive topics of memory and forgetting, youth and generational change, gender, sexuality and transnational kinship. Her research focuses on Africa - specifically the island of Madagascar - and the legacy of Madagascar's colonial and now post-colonial encounter with France.

 

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Jennifer Cole

Michele Friedner

Michele Friedner is a social and medical anthropologist whose work examines both the category of and experience of “deafness” and “disability,” particularly in urban India. She is interested in how political economic changes in India have created new opportunities and constraints for deaf and disabled people in the arenas of employment, education, politics, religion, and everyday life.

Susan Goldin-Meadow

Susan Goldin-Meadow is the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor. Her work explores language creation in deaf children in the US, China, Turkey and, most recently, Nicaragua, and also the impact that our bodies––in particular, the gestures we produce when we talk––have on thinking and learning.  She is co-director of the new Center for Gesture, Sign and Language at the University.

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Susan Goldin-Meadow

Sydney Hans

Sydney Hans is a Professor at the School of Social Service Administration. Her research seeks to understand how biological and social factors interact in contributing to risk and resilience in human development.

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Guanglei Hong

Guanglei Hong has focused her research on developing causal inference theories and methods for evaluating educational and social policies and programs in multi-level, longitudinal settings.

 

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Susan Levine

Susan Levine is co-director of the Center for Early Childhood Research and serves as the chair of the Psychology Department. She directs the Cognitive Development Lab. Her research interests include cognitive development, development and plasticity of spatial skills, early quantitative development, and language development and functional plasticity in children with early brain injuries.

Read more about Susan Levine on her Department of Psychology profile page.

John Lucy

John Lucy's research focuses on the impact of grammatical diversity on thought, the development of language and thought in middle childhood, and the role of metalinguistic capabilities in human social interaction.

On leave 2017.

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Dario Maestripieri

Dario Maestripieri is a Professor in Comparative Human Development and is also affiliated with the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge. 

His current main interests are, a) evolution of human behavior and its biological regulation, b) 20th century European literature.

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Anna Mueller

Anna S. Mueller is a sociologist whose research examines how social relationships and social contexts shape adolescent health and wellbeing over the transition to adulthood. She is also interested in how schools, as social organizations, shape social relationships and opportunities to learn, thereby affecting the life chances of children. Her conceptual research interests are matched by her methodological interests in social network analysis, multi-level modeling, and in-depth qualitative case studies of adolescent societies.

Eugene Raikhel

Eugene Raikhel is a cultural and medical anthropologist with interests encompassing the anthropology of science, biomedicine and psychiatry; addiction and its treatment; suggestion and healing; and post-socialist transformations in Eurasia.

 

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Lindsey Richland

Lindsey Richland investigates children's memory and analytical reasoning development.  Much of her work explores children's emergent ability to think about relationships and make inferences such as through metaphor and analogy.

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