The Human Development Group in the NACS program spans faculty in the Departments of Heaing and Speech Science, Kinesiology, Linguistics and Human Development.

Research interests include the development of brain-behavior relationships in motor skills, language, temperment, social behavior, and decision making. This wide range of interests provides students with the opportunity to explore a variety of developmental topics across a range of ages, from infancy through school-aged children. The unifying theme of this work is an emphasis on change over time, or the process of development.

The area of human development is unique in the extent to which it integrates basic and applied developmental research. The laboratories within the area have made a priority not only of conducting cutting-edge research on developmental process, but also of linking these findings with applied research on disorders and intervention.


Bolger, Donald J., Human Development

The core of my research focuses on key issues of reading from a neurobiological, cognitive, and educational perspective.* *The primary goal of my research is to understand brain development with respect to reading and language and how impairment and remediation are reflected in cortex. From school-based and cross-sectional paradigms to adult training tasks, my work combines innovative and complex methodologies in functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and event-related potentials (ERP) with developmental and behavioral research.

Cassidy, Jude, Psychology

Her interest is in socioemotional development with specific emphasis on attachment.

Clark, Jane, Kinesiology

Dr.Clark's work focuses on understanding the development of movement control and coordination in motor skills. Her current work examines the role of sensory information in the development of upright posture and locomotion in infants. She also has an on-going project to study perception-action relationships with children who have motor coordination problems.

Daughters, Stacey B.,

Dr. Daughters is an Assistant Professor and the Director of the Stress, Health, and Addictions Research Program (SHARP) in the Department of Public and Community Health in the School of Public Health. Her research expertise includes the neurobiological and behavioral determinants of addiction and HIV risk behavior, and the translation of this knowledge into effective prevention and intervention programs aimed at reducing health disparities. She is currently examining the relationship between neurobiological indices of distress tolerance and substance use treatment outcomes via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and salivary cortisol collection (HPA axis). She is also the PI on a NIDA funded R01 grant evaluating an integrated treatment to increase HIV medication adherence and decrease depression and sexual risk taking behavior among depressed, HIV positive minority substance users.

Dougherty, Lea R., Psychology

Dr. Dougherty's research interests lie broadly in the examination of the etiology and course of depression from a developmental, life-span perspective. Within this domain, her research focuses on two areas: (1) an examination of the developmental origins of neuroendocrine dysfunction in depression, which includes examining linkages between possible endophenotypes for mood disorder and specific genotypes; and (2) understanding the phenomenology of depression in preschoolers and establishing empirically-based assessment approaches for depression, and other mood disorders, in very young children.

Fox, Nathan, Human Development

My research centers on the effects of early experience on brain development with special emphasis on the prefrontal cortex. I am interested in social and emotional development and study human infants and young children using electrophysiology(EEG and ERP).

Hatfield, Bradley, Kinesiology

The focus of Dr. Hatfield's program in exercise and sport psychology deals with both the health-related and performance-related aspects of humans in exercise/sport settings.

Jiang, Nan, Linguistics

Nan Jiang studies adult second language acquisition and bilingual language processing from a cognitive perspective. His ongoing research projects concern topics such as bilingual lexical organization, language transfer, the automatization of linguistic knowledge, semantic development in second language acquisition.

Killen, Melanie, Professor of Human Development and Director, Training Program in Social Development, Human Development

My research laboratory investigates social and moral cognition in children and adolescents. We study how children and adolescents evaluate straightforward and complex social and moral dilemmas and everyday issues, and how social experience is related to social cognition. In addition, we examine how culture influences social judgments, with collaborative projects in Korea, Japan, Israel, Jordan, Germany, Spain, and the U.K. Our topics include evaluations of racial exclusion, gender exclusion, intergroup bias, intergroup relationships, stereotypes, moral judgment, and social reasoning.

Newman, Rochelle, Director, Language Development & Perception Laboratories, Hearing and Speech Sciences

My research focuses on speech perception, word recognition, and language acquisition. More specifically, I am interested in questions such as how the brain recognizes words from fluent speech, the time course over which different stages of speech processing occur, and how listeners (especially infants) separate different streams of speech that occur at the same time.

Oliveira, Marcio A., Kinesiology

Dr. Oliveira's research focuses on the developmental changes in a neural network, the so-called mirror neuron system (MNS), which is thought to be involved in action understanding and production during early experience. He also has ongoing projects that seeks to characterize the developmental process of finger force control and understand changes in the neuromechanical variables as motor control develops.

Riggins, Tracy, Psychology

Research in Dr. Riggins's lab investigates the development of cognitive abilities, such as memory, in infants and young children. She is especially interested in how the development of the brain contributes to changes in cognition early in life. These questions are addressed using multiple methodological tools including behavioral and neuroimaging techniques (event-related potentials, ERPs and magnetic resonance imaging, MRI) in both typically developing children and children with neurodevelopmental disorders. The overall goal of research in Dr. Riggins's lab is to develop a better understanding of how early experiences influence the development of brain-behavior relations and result in individual differences in cognitive performance.

Scholnick, Ellin, Sr VP Academic Affairs & Provost, Psychology

Her interest is in ways in which cognitive and linguistic development influence one another and in planning.

Taneyhill, Lisa, Animal and Avian Sciences

The Taneyhill lab studies the vertebrate neural crest, a transient population of migratory cells that ultimately differentiate to become a wide range of structures, including the peripheral nervous system, pigment cells, and the cranial bones and cartilage. Consequently, many human congenital and hereditary malformations (such as craniofacial abnormalities and heart defects), diseases and cancers result from aberrant neural crest development. Our lab uses molecular, cellular, and biochemical techniques to study neural crest formation in the chicken embryo to better understand overall animal growth and development.

Woodward, Amanda, Psychology

At the Maryland Infant Studies Laboratory we investigate babies' understanding of the social world. In particular, we study how babies make sense of other people's actions.

• Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Lab
• The Child Development Lab
• The Language Development Lab
• The Motor Development Lab