Amanda Woodward is the William S. Gray Professor of Psychology and Dean of the Division of Social Sciences. She was a founding member of the Center for Early Childhood Research. She completed her undergraduate degree at Swarthmore College in 1987 and her doctoral degree at Stanford University in 1992.  She joined the faculty at the University of Chicago in 1993.

Yiyi is a postdoctoral researcher in the Infant Learning and Development Laboratory. She studies social development, especially the emergence of social biases and the development of moral evaluation and empathy. She uses both behavioral and neuroimaging methods (especially EEG). 

Alex is a doctoral student in Developmental Psychology working with Drs. Amanda Woodward and Alex Shaw. Alex is interested in how humans from infancy to adulthood come to acquire, understand, and create the unspoken rules and norms of social and moral life. He is also interested in how relationships like friendship, kinship, and the caregiver-child bond create moral obligations, expectations, and tradeoffs between values that don’t hold for interactions between strangers.

Denisse is a PhD student in the lab whose research focuses on how beliefs and attitudes about migration develop.

Lulu is a fourth-year undergraduate student in the college studying psychology and philosophy. She is fascinated by the fields of psychoimmunology and stress psychology. Following graduation, she hopes to pursue a doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology and eventually be a mental health professional working with young adults. 

Breanna is a third year Cognitive Science major in the college with a double minor in Entrepreneurship and Romance Languages and Literature. Breanna’s interest is piqued by the intersection between social and cultural influences on the development of infants and how this bleeds into adulthood. Additionally, she is captivated by the influence of language on one’s perception and cognitive development. 

Talia is a fourth-year undergraduate student at UCLA pursuing a major in Psychology and a minor in Applied Developmental Psychology. She is passionate about developmental psychology, with a particular interest in how early attachment and adverse experiences shape outcomes across the lifespan. She is also deeply committed to supporting both neurodiverse and neurotypical children in inclusive, nurturing environments. 

Bethany Ou is a recent graduate from the MAPSS Psychology program at the University of Chicago. While working in the Woodward Lab, she completed her master’s thesis examining the association between social network size and social fear in infants and toddlers.