Our Mission: Advancing Developmental Science. Enhancing Lives

Our Mission: Advancing Developmental Science. Enhancing Lives

Our Institute seeks to advance understanding of human development through pioneering contributions to developmental science. Our broader mission is to advance knowledge that informs policies and practices—in ways that lead to improvements in the lives of infants, children, adolescents, their families, communities, and society.

 

Our Vision: Integrative and Actionable Developmental Science

Our vision of developmental science is transdisciplinary. It incorporates and helps to integrate research from several social and biological disciplines—including developmental psychology, education, public health, the science of learning, developmental neuroscience, developmental biology, genetics/epigenetics, and computational modeling of learning processes. It focuses on understanding  the processes that underpin learning, adaptation, and development. It places equal emphasis on understanding the family, social, economic and cultural contexts that actively shape learning and development, as well as the study of institutions and policies that impact the development of youth (including social welfare, public health, health care, law, juvenile justice, and public policy).

 

Most importantly, we aspire to an integrative developmental science that contributes to actionable insights. The grand challenges in the sphere of human development are exceedingly complex. Bringing an integrative developmental science lens to these complexities can provide innovative insights—in ways that can inform high-impact issues ranging from healthy development and education to social policy and social justice—locally and globally.