Developmental Psychology
Although there is no developmental psychology program, per se, at CU Boulder, several of the labs across different departmental program areas address issues relating to development. The following is a list of faculty currently doing developmentally related work and a brief overview of their research.
Marie T. Banich, Distinguished Professor
marie.banich@colorado.edu
Website
303-492-6655
Developmental interests: Neural and cognitive bases of the development of executive function in adolescence; Disruptions of executive function in adolescence in populations such as individuals with substance dependence or attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder.
Eliana Colunga, Associate Professor
Eliana.Colunga@Colorado.EDU
Web
303-492-4282
Developmental interests: I work with children ranging between 12 months and 4 years of age. I combine computational modeling (mostly connectionist networks) and empirical methods with children and adults to study language and cognitive development.
Naomi P. Friedman, Assistant Professor
Naomi.Friedman@colorado.edu
Website
Developmental interests: Stability and change in executive function abilities and relations between adolescent executive function abilities and developmental behavior problems and psychopathology. I work with a large longitudinal twin study that spans ages 1 to 30 years, so much of my work incorporates growth models of cognitive and behavioral development across a broad age range.
Roselinde Kaiser, Assistant Professor
Roselinde.Kaiser@colorado.edu
https://www.colorado.edu/lab/raddlab/
303-735-8306
Developmental interests: Adolescent mental health and brain development. In the RADD Lab, we work with teens and young adults to better understand stress, pleasure, and self-regulation, and how those experiences are reflected in neurobiological systems. We are especially interested in discovering the mechanisms of psychiatric risk for mood problems, or the mechanisms of resilience and growth, with the goal of fostering wellness through translational science.
Tamar Kodish, Assistant Professor
Tamar.Kodish@colorado.edu
https://www.colorado.edu/clinicalpsychology/tamar-kodish-phd
Developmental interests: My research focuses on improving access, engagement, and quality of mental health services for marginalized young people with depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. My research harnesses implementation science principles and community-partnered approaches to identify racial/ethnic disparities in mental health problems and service access, design strategies and interventions that can mitigate these inequities and improve care quality, and implement them in community-based settings. In pursuit of this goal, my work has explored nontraditional service delivery paradigms, such as integrated care, school-based services, and digital mental health.
Soo Rhee, Professor
Soo.Rhee@colorado.edu
http://www.colorado.edu/psych-neuro/soo-h-rhee
303-492-5364
Developmental interests: Prospective, longitudinal, genetically informative studies examining early risk and protective factors for antisocial behavior and substance use/substance use disorders.
Erik Willcutt, Professor
Erik.Willcutt@colorado.edu
303-492-3304
Developmental interests: The development of an optimal nosology of mental disorders across the lifespan, with a specific focus on childhood disorders such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), learning disabilities, and other psychopathology that frequently co-occurs with ADHD and LD.
Lei Yuan, Assistant Professor
Lei.Yuan@colorado.edu
Website
303-492-7487
Developmental interests: I am interested in the learning mechanisms that drive cognitive development and lead to generalizable learning in fundamental domains (e.g., number, space, language); and the bridge between early implicit learning to later school learning of explicit principles. The DEL lab investigates these questions using cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, training experiments, computational modeling, high-density behavioral data collection (e.g., eye tracking), and translational research in schools.