Faculty

Rachel F. Barr

Professor – Infant Cognition
Email: rfb5@georgetown.edu
Interests: Transfer of learning skills by infants, utilization of information sources available to infants for learning including television, books and touchscreens, role of parent-child interactions during learning, bilingual and monolingual memory development.

Sandra L. Calvert

Professor – Children’s Digital Media
Director, Children’s Digital Media Center
Email: calverts@georgetown.edu   
Interests: Developmental and child psychology; cognitive and social development of children; effects of television and computers on children’s development.

Yulia E. Chentsova-Dutton

Associate Professor – Cultural Psychology
Email: yec2@georgetown.edu
Interests: Cultural psychology; affective science; emotional responding; advice-giving; cultural differences in major depression.

Jessica Chiang

Assistant Professor – Health Psychology
Email: jessica.chiang@georgetown.edu
Interests: stress, early adversity, daily experiences, health, psychoneuroimmunology, biological and behavioral pathways, protective factors, adolescence

Adam E. Green

Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor – Cognitive Neuroscience
Email: aeg58@georgetown.edu                  
Interests: Relational Thinking and Reasoning; Creativity; Educational Neuroscience (especially in real-world STEM classrooms); Spatial Cognition; Intelligence; Learning; Neural Representation and Representational Change; Cognitive Neurogenetics; The Cognition of Belief; Facilitating creative intelligence via cognitive and neural interventions.

Anna D. Johnson

Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor – Child Development & Public Policy
Email: johnsoad@georgetown.edu    
Interests: Child development; public policy; early environmental influences on vulnerable children’s development (poverty, early care and education, early intervention).

Kostadin Kushlev

Assistant Professor – Psychology of Health and Well-Being
Email: kostadin.kushlev@georgetown.edu
Interests: Subjective well-being; health; interpersonal communication; social relationships; human-computer interaction; human-centered computing; ubiquitous computing;  computer-mediated communication; basic human needs; social capital; stress; sleep.

Ian Lyons

Assistant Professor – Cognitive Neuroscience
Email: ian.lyons@georgetown.edu
Interests: Numerical cognition; mathematical thinking and learning; math anxiety; math education – social, cognitive and emotional factors; acquisition of symbolic systems – numerical symbol representation; cognitive development; cognitive neuroscience.

Janet Mann

Professor – Animal Behavior 
Email: mannj2@georgetown.edu               
Interests:Ethology; ecology; evolution; development and parental care in mammals; current research on the behavioral ecology, tool-use, reproduction and development in female bottlenose dolphins and their calves.

Abigail A. Marsh

Professor – Social & Affective Neuroscience
Co-Director of Graduate Studies
Email: aam72@georgetown.edu                  
Interests: Emotion, empathy, altruism, aggression, social perception and nonverbal behavior.

Fathali M. Moghaddam

Professor – Social, Cultural, & Political Psychology
Director, Interdisciplinary Program in Cognitive Science
Email: moghaddf@georgetown.edu              
Interests: Professor Moghaddam’s research explores the cognitive and cultural foundations of political behavior, with specific focus on democracy and democratization, rights and duties, conflict, terrorism, and minority-integration.

W. Gerrod Parrott

Professor – Human Emotions
Email: parrottg@georgetown.edu
Interests: Functional and dysfunctional aspects of emotion; cultural variability of emotions; history of emotion theory and research; envy, jealousy, shame, guilt, and embarrassment; interdisciplinary research involving psychology and the humanities.

Deborah A. Phillips

Professor – Developmental Psychology
Affiliated Faculty, McCourt School of Public Policy
Co-Director, Center for Research on Children in the United States
Email: dap4@georgetown.edu              
Interests: Developmental psychology; child development and public policy; effects of early care and education on early development.

Rebecca M. Ryan

Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor – Human Development & Public Policy
Co-Director of Graduate Studies
Email: rmr64@georgetown.edu

Interests: Early child development; environmental influences on development (parenting, family structure, and socioeconomic context); developmental perspectives on child and family policy.

Deborah C. Stearns

Teaching Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Email: stearndc@georgetown.edu

Chandan J. Vaidya

Professor – Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience
Vice Provost for Faculty
Email: cjv2@georgetown.edu

Interests: Neurobiological basis of normal and disordered development of executive control (e.g. Attention Deficit Disorder, Autism) using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and behavioral methods.

Jennifer L. Woolard

Professor – Developmental, Community, & Law
Department Chair   
Adjunct Professor of Law, Georgetown Law Center
Email: jlw47@georgetown.edu

Interests: Developmental and community psychology; law and social policy; adolescent and school violence; judgment and decision-making in legal contexts; attorney-client interactions and ethical violations; intimate violence victimization.