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, Professor
marie.banich@colorado.edu
https://www.colorado.edu/faculty/banich/
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.
Angela Bryan, Professor
angela.bryan@colorado.edu
http://www.colorado.edu/changelab/
303-492-8264
Developmental interests: Risky behavior during adolescence including unsafe sexual behavior, alcohol use, drug use, and the confluence of sexual risk and substance use; neurocognitive and genetic underpinnings of adolescent risky decision-making and risk-taking.
Eliana Colunga, Associate Professor
Eliana.Colunga@Colorado.EDU
http://psych.colorado.edu/~colunga/
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
http://www.colorado.edu/ibg/naomi-friedman
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.
John K. Hewitt, Professor
John.Hewitt@colorado.edu
https://www.colorado.edu/ibg/john-hewitt
Developmental interests: Uses cross-sectional and longitudinal studies of twins and families to study behavioral development, and genetic and environmental influences on behavior, personality, and health. Recent research focuses on the development of: behavior problems in childhood and adolescence; of vulnerability to drug use, abuse, and dependence; and of their relationship to executive cognitive functions.
Roselinde Kaiser, Assistant Professor
Roselinde.Kaiser@colorado.edu@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.
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
http://psych.colorado.edu/~willcutt/index.html
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
https://www.colorado.edu/lab/del/
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.