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- Candidates for President-Elect
- Candidates for Treasurer
- Candidates for Governing Council Members-at-Large
Candidates are listed alphabetically under each position.
Candidates for President-Elect
Jennifer E. Lansford
I am a Research Professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy and Director of the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University. I earned my PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Michigan in 2000 and have been a member of SRCD since 1995. Notable contributions to SRCD include serving on the International Affairs Committee from 2011 to 2017 (co-chairing the committee from 2015 to 2017) and serving on the Program Committee from 2015 to 2021 (Program Co-Chair for the 2019 biennial meeting in Baltimore). I also have served in numerous other national and international leadership roles. For example, I chair the U.S. National Committee for Psychological Science of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and previously chaired the U.S. NIH Psychosocial Development, Risk and Prevention Study Section. I chaired a 2021 workshop for journal editors hosted by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that focused on how psychological science journals can encompass diverse perspectives by supporting scholars, peer-review, and high-quality science.
I will draw on these experiences to advance SRCD’s strategic goals of promoting cutting-edge developmental science, communicating and translating scientific knowledge to inform policies and practices to improve human well-being, integrating cultural and national diversity, and engaging members who bring a number of different perspectives to the organization. I am deeply committed to SRCD as an organization and to its mission to advance the developmental sciences and promote the use of developmental research to improve human lives. The last year has been a particularly difficult one for SRCD, but my leadership characteristics would help stabilize the organization while also helping it grow in important new directions, including building on SRCD’s existing strengths by trying to increase representation of historically under-represented groups. Thank you for your consideration.
Stephen T. Russell
To advance integrative developmental sciences, SRCD engages diverse disciplines, methodologies, and people; I am committed to that mission and would be honored to serve as President. My desire for developmental sciences is to value and prioritize research that promotes social change in the service of social justice (Russell, 2015; 2016). The last years have seen societal changes and upheaval that were unprecedented in a generation. We have felt reverberations in SRCD, and like many other committed members I have had mixed emotions in the last few years. I am convinced that we need to lean into these tensions with a goal of reconciliation through our shared mission and vision. There is much on the horizon for SRCD: the changing landscape of membership, conferences, and academic publishing; organizational finances; society management; and interpersonal relations. I have experience in thinking about what it means to be an academic society today, and I have a commitment to provide leadership.
I am Regents Professor in Child Development and Director of the School of Human Ecology at the University of Texas at Austin. My research takes an international and intersectional approach to understand sexual orientation and gender identity in child and adolescent development, situated in the context of families and schools. My 2016 book with Stacey Horn, Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Schooling: The Nexus of Research, Practice and Policy, won awards from APA and SRA. I have a long relationship with EARA and hosted an EARA-SRA International Summer School. I have served on consensus committees for the National Academies, the boards of NCFR (Treasurer; elected fellow), the Council on Contemporary Families, the National Scientific Council on Adolescence, and SRA (as President 2012-2014). I am currently a member of the SRCD Governing Council.
Candidates for Treasurer
James H. Bray, Ph.D.
It is an honor to stand for election for Treasurer of SRCD.I bring extensive organizational experience and skills to be an effective SRCD Treasurer. I strongly support SRCD’s strategic plan and would work collaboratively with the Governing Council and staff to define the role and responsibilities of the Treasurer. This would be a top priority during the first years on the GC. The primary role of the Treasurer is to work with the GC and staff to insure that SRCD has sufficient financial resources to accomplish its strategic goals. I have a keen eye for details and managing budgets. I will bring a forward-thinking perspective with high energy and enthusiasm to the GC. I am a long-term member of SRCD with extensive governance experience in other related organizations. Relevant organizational experience includes: Chair of the International Association of Applied Psychology Finance Committee; Treasurer of 5Divisions of the American Psychological Association(APA) and member of the Texas Psychological Association Finance committee. I was the 2009President of the American Psychological Association. I was a representative of the APA Board of Directors to the APA Finance Committee for three years. Our primary initiatives as APA President were on the Future of Psychology Practice and Science and focusing on psychological contributions to ending homelessness. In addition, during my presidency I led the first strategic planning process for the APA. I am currently Professor of Psychology and former department chair at the University of Texas San Antonio. I was previously on the faculty in the Department of Family & Community Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. My NIH funded research focuses on adolescent substance use in diverse youth and developmental factors in divorce, remarriage and stepfamilies. I have over 200 publications and have presented my work in 20 countries.
Lisa M. López, Ph.D.
I am honored to be nominated for the position of SRCD Treasurer as part of the SRCD Executive Team. SRCD has been my professional home for over 20 years, and I am deeply invested in the mission and goals of the organization. Within SRCD I have served in several leadership capacities (e.g., Latinx Caucus Chair, Special Topics Meeting (STM) co-organizer, Coalition member, ERI Committee member), that have provided me insight into SRCD’s priorities and strategic direction, for which I am committed. As Treasurer my priority would be to insure both fiscal management and the alignment of financial practices with SRCD’s priorities and strategic direction. My knowledge of SRCD as well as my experiences managing the day-to-day accounting needs of federal research grants; being fiscally responsible for programmatic needs as program chair within my university department; monitoring the donations, dues, and fundraising efforts of the Latinx caucus; and working jointly with my STM co-organizers and SRCD staff to identify potential funders and cost-effective means to help limit the costs to participants make me a strong candidate for this position. I have served in leadership positions within my university, within foundations in my community, and within SRCD. I understand the type of financial information necessary to support decision making and value the need to consider different investment mechanisms to maintain reserves while also meeting the growing needs of the society in advancing developmental science; engaging members; integrating diversity; building capacity; and communicating, exchanging, and translating research for policy and practice.
Candidates for Governing Council Members-at-Large
Lucia Alcala, Ph.D.
I earned my Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of California Santa Cruz under the mentorship of Dr. Barbara Rogoff (June, 2014). I spent one year at the Universidad Maya de Quintana Roo as a visiting professor before coming to CSUF in the fall of 2016.
I was also awarded a post doc fellowship by the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States at UC Riverside to conduct research at the Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del IPN (CINVESTAV), Unidad Mérida, Yucatán México (2015).
Dr. Alcalá conducts empirical research guided by sociocultural theory, exploring the interaction between cultural and environmental factors in children’s development. Currently she has projects investigating (a) cross-cultural aspects of children’s cognitive development (planning, collaboration, and executive function), (b) development of children’s prosocial behavior in diverse families (U.S. and Mexico), and (c) the impact of service-learning experiences in college students’ civic engagement and academic development.
Stephen Asatsa, Ph.D.
I am a Lecturer of Psychology and Head of Department of Psychology at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa, Kenya having obtained my doctoral degree in Counseling Psychology from the same University in 2018. I have been a member of SRCD since 2016. I served on the Student and Early Career Council as the teaching committee representative from 2017- 2021 where I actively participated in meetings and dissertation award review.
If elected to serve in the position of member at large, I hope to bring on board previous experience working with SRCD committees, the much needed multicultural competencies and governance experience from the Low and Middle Income Countries. This will help complement and enrich the governance of SRCD which has for a long time had large representation of professionals from other geographical regions compared to global South.
I will push for intentional membership recruitment campaigns in the majority world in order to increase diversity in the organization. I will take an active role in advocating for formation of regional chapters of SRCD in order to attract membership from the underrepresented regions. This will help give the organization a global face.
I will also lobby for creation of Masters and Undergraduate division within the early career membership where they can be members and mentored by the PhD student members. This is key in ensuring continuity of the organization beyond the current generation and raising future developmental scholars from an early stage.
I will lobby for rotational hosting of biennial meetings across other regions globally and promote research collaborations in order to spread the influence of SRCD beyond North America.
Christina Spears Brown
I am very committed to the success and reputation of SRCD as the leading scientific organization focused on developmental science. To be successful, SRCD must have both scientific and social value. This is possible by supporting rigorous science from around the world, leading the field in anti-racist and transparent methods and practices, disseminating research to educators, families, and policymakers, and enriching the intellectual and professional lives of diverse developmental scholars across their careers.
My commitment to SRCD is longstanding, dating back to when I began graduate school at The University of Texas at Austin in 1998. I have a long history of active service and leadership within SRCD, as I have previously chaired the Equity and Justice Committee, served on the Ethnic and Racial Issues Committee, the Nominations Committee, and the Rapid Assessment and Response Strategy team, and helped create the SOGIE Caucus. I currently serve on the Publications Committee. I was also the Scholar-in-Residence of SRCD in 2019. In addition, I regularly serve as a Panel Chair for the Biennials.
Beyond my service to SRCD, I am a developmental scientist whose research focuses on children’s experiences with discrimination and the development of gender and ethnic stereotypes across middle childhood and early adolescence. I am an endowed professor in Developmental Psychology and Associate Dean of Inclusive Excellence at the University of Kentucky. As is evident by my CV, I have an extensive research and publication record. Indeed, I have published multiple times in every one of SRCD’s publications: Child Development, Child Development Perspectives, Monographs (both as an author and as an invited commentary), and Social Policy Report. I am currently the Associate Editor of British Journal of Developmental Psychology, and previously an Associate Editor of Journal of Adolescent Research. I have also served as a Consulting Editor for Child Development and Journal of Research on Adolescence. My research and mentorship has been funded by Foundation for Child Development, National Science Foundation, Willam T. Grant Foundation, and American Psychological Association. I look forward to working to strengthen SRCD in the future.
Esther J. Calzada, Ph.D.
I am a clinical child psychologist, a social work professor, and the Associate Dean for Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility at the Steve Hicks School of Social Work at the University of Texas at Austin. I also serve as Director of the Texas Center for Equity Promotion in the College of Education. My research focuses on the mental health and achievement of young Latinx children and aims to incorporate influences of culture and context into models of psychosocial preventive interventions to better support Latinx children, parents and communities. An important goal of my work is to reshape scholarly narratives so that Latinx children are seen in their full humanity.
I share SCRD’s commitment to harnessing the learnings of developmental science to improve human lives and believe we can only fully accomplish this goal by tackling issues of racial and social justice. But such efforts are steeped in politics and as a result, injustice too often goes unchecked in academia and industry. As a woman of color and an equity-minded scholar, I support anti-racist efforts by SRCD that apply a critical lens to evaluate power, policies and procedures that govern our work; illuminate and voice injustices rooted in racial and other social hierarchies; and redefine the landscape of developmental science to be inclusive. I consider a strong and diverse SRCD membership as essential to these processes. I welcome the opportunity to serve SRCD, particularly in its antiracist and inclusive commitments, as a Member-at-Large of the Governing Council.
Jeffrey Liew
I am Professor of Educational Psychology at Texas A&M University, and my research focuses on social-emotional development and emotional self-regulation processes in children and youth. I am particularly interested in examining individuals’ resilience, thriving, and flourishing, including the risk and protective factors that are linked to developmental and academic or learning outcomes. If elected as SRCD Member At-Large, I will work collaboratively with SRCD members and leaders to cultivate an inclusive and interdisciplinary research culture to advance developmental science in ways that will represent the full diversity of children, youth, and families that we aim to impact through our research and scholarly work. I am an active member of the SRCD Asian Caucus and serve as the Chair for the SRCD Asian Caucus Mentoring committee. In addition, I serve on the SRCD Interdisciplinary Committee, which has a mission to “to help build equitable interdisciplinary bridges that break down these silos, and to inspire as well as foster a culture that rewards the next generation of scientists to address complex human development questions with an interdisciplinary frame.” My commitment for inclusive and interdisciplinary research is reflected in a recent scholarly volume that I co-edited on “Family Literacy Practices in Asian and Latinx Families: Educational and Cultural Considerations.” I am an active member in my scientific and scholarly communities, and I am an elected American Psychological Association (APA) Fellow for outstanding contributions and national impact in the field of psychology. I also have served in multiple service and leadership positions, including Associate Dean for Research in the School of Education and Human Development and Interim Head for my Department at my university. I also serve as the incoming Editor-in-Chief of Early Education and Development and the Co-Editor of the Section on Social Emotional Learning in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Education.
Charles A. Nelson
It is a great honor to be considered for membership on the governing council of SRCD. I joined the society when I was a postdoc and have never wavered in my commitment to developmental science and to the society; I have always viewed SRCD as my intellectual home.
Having been crossed trained in both developmental psychology and developmental neuroscience, my work has long been situated at the nexus of brain and behavioral development. My long-standing interests lie in elucidating the myriad of factors that lead some children to develop typically and others atypically. In the first part of my career I focused on the development and neural bases of social information processing and on memory; later in my career I turned my attention to how both genes and environments influence developmental outcomes; for example, I have studied children with rare genetic disorders that lead some to develop autism; and I have studied children whose environments fail to support healthy development, such as those experiencing profound psychosocial deprivation early in life. Finally, my long-standing interests in early adversity has led me to situate some of my research program to children growing up in low resource settings; for example, with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for the past 7 years I have been studying children growing up in profound poverty in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
I bring to the governing council a highly interdisciplinary perspective on developmental science. The first half of my career was spent in a developmental psychology program, and the second in a medical school (pediatrics and neuroscience). I therefore can represent multiple disciplines in my role as a member of the governing council; moreover, my international work brings with it an appreciation for children growing up in very diverse cultures.
John Richards
I am a Research Professor and Carolina Distinguished Scholar Emeritus at the University of South Carolina, and have been there since I received my Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles in Developmental Psychology. I attended my first meeting when I was a graduate student, in San Francisco in 1981, and have been a member since 1982. I have served on the SRCD program committee for several years, including as panel chair on multiple occasions. I am an active member in several scientific societies and have served on executive and program committees. I am a fellow in several scientific organizations (AAAS, APA, APS, SPR).
As a member-at-large of the SRCD Governing Council, I will emphasize SRCD’s continuing excellence in developmental science. My research expertise is developmental cognitive neuroscience, with an emphasis on the role of brain development in infant attention. I will emphasize the role of developmental science and neuroscience in the society’s journals and meetings. I would like to see special programs dealing with developmental neuroscience as it applies to child development, in both the publications and special meetings.
I have mentored several young scientists. This includes predoctoral and postdoctoral training, and a mentor on several NIH training awards. On the Governing Council I will join the emphasis of the SRCD on young professionals in the society, including opportunities to join in administrative functions of SRCD.
I do not have specific agenda plans for the society, or for my work on the Governing Council. It is important to have representation of the scientific viewpoint when dealing with socio-political issues, DEI, journal and administrative policies, and outreach to the non-scientific community through clinical applications and applied developmental science. My background in developmental science and neuroscience will retain this emphasis in the Society for Research in Child Development.
Carlos E. Santos
Carlos E. Santos is Associate Professor of Social Welfare in the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. He holds an undergraduate and doctoral degree in developmental psychology from NYU. He completed his master’s in education at Harvard University. His research focuses on ethnic-racial, gender, and sexual minority identity in relation to various developmental outcomes using an intersectional approach. He employs developmental theories and empirical methodologies in order to study the contexts within which identities are formed, develop, and change over time among primarily Latinx youth. His research has also explored legal consciousness among Latinx youth and the development of these youth in state level contexts that are socially and politically hostile towards immigrants. His empirical contributions with colleagues were recognized as “pioneering” (Jugert et al., 2020, p. 949, Child Development) in showing the effects of peers and peer networks on ethnic-racial identity. He was awarded multiple early career awards for achievement in research from three different national professional associations. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Santos is a member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Forum on Children’s Well-Being. He is a principal grant reviewer for the US Dept of Ed/IES, an ad hoc reviewer for NSF, and a former Associate Editor of the Journal of Adolescent Research. His co-edited book, Studying Ethnic Identity: Methodological and Conceptual Approaches Across Disciplines, was published by the American Psychological Association Press in 2015.
Laura K. Taylor, Ph.D.
Laura K. Taylor, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the School of Psychology, University College Dublin, Ireland. As PI of the Helping Kids! lab, she studies risk and resilience processes for youth in settings of protracted conflict, as well as immigrant and refugee youth in the United States and Europe. Toward this end, her research examines how and why violence affects behaviours and attitudes related to peacebuilding, primarily during childhood and adolescence.
Laura previously served as the Society for Research on Adolescence (SRA) International Committee Chair (2018-2020) and SRA representative to the International Consortium of Developmental Science Societies (ICDSS) (2020-2022). Laura also was an elected member of the Governing Council of the International Society for Political Psychology (ISPP) (2019-2022), Social Psychology Committee of the British Psychological Society (BPS) (2017-2022), and serves on the steering committee of the International Network for Peace Psychology (INPP) (2017-present). Laura co-chaired the programme committee of the European Association for Research on Adolescence (EARA) conference in 2022. Laura is the Editor of the APA journal Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, Associate Editor for the Journal of Research on Adolescence, and Consulting Editor for Child Development.
As a member-at-large of the SRCD Governing Council, Laura would help the society to advance developmental science through: (1) integrating diversity, including a focus on non-WEIRD contexts; (2) encouraging multi-disciplinary collaborations; (3) promoting science communication and translational efforts for policymakers and practitioners; and (4) fostering and expanding cross-society capacities in these areas. For example, she will build on previous work with ICDSS to promote international outreach and recruitment for biannual meetings, and work closely with the caucuses to expand SRCD’s diversity initiatives.
Russell Toomey
The Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) is one of my primary professional organizations, and I have been honored to serve in various leadership roles of SRCD committees/caucuses over the past decade. I initially served on SRCD’s Student and Early Career Council (SECC) and was the SECC member of the Equity and Social Justice (ESJ) Committee from 2011-2015; I was then an appointed member of the ESJ committee from 2015-2019. I have also served on the bylaws, awards, and nominating committees of the SOGIE Caucus, and am a member of the Latinx Caucus. I believe that I have the knowledge and skills needed to be an engaged Member At-Large of the Governing Council of SRCD from day one, if elected. As a prospective member of SRCD’s Governing Council, I am particularly interested in ensuring that underrepresented members and unrepresented populations are centered in our work as we navigate a world where the majority of children and adolescents do not hold privileged identities. As a queer-identified transmasculine person who conducts research with SGM and Latinx populations, I aim to create affirming and supportive opportunities in developmental science for scholars from marginalized and underrepresented backgrounds who may not otherwise see themselves or their experiences represented in the academy or in the extant literature. I have extensive experience co-leading and supporting efforts to make systemic change in SRCD, SRA, NCFR, and other similar organizations, including my leadership experience as chair of my academic program and director of an interdisciplinary university-wide institute. I thrive in situations where I can engage in visionary leadership positions where practical actions and outcomes are warranted, and hope that I am able to continue to serve SRCD in this way. I would be honored to receive your vote to be a new At-Large Member of SRCD’s Governing Council.