Research

Advocacy and Community-Based Trauma Studies (ACTS) Lab - Dr. Alisha Ali

Our lab conducts research on treatments and interventions designed to help groups and individuals who have experienced trauma, violence, discrimination, and other forms of oppression. We are currently conducting a series of studies on the DE-CRUIT program which uses techniques from theatre and classical actor training in combination with elements from cognitive and narrative therapy modalities to treat trauma in military veterans. These studies are supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Military Psychology Division of the American Psychological Association, the Humanities Council of New York, and the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund.

ARCADIA  - Dr. Pamela Morris-Perez

ARCADIA for Early Childhood takes a developmentally informed, partnered approach to understanding how children's early experiences at home and in child care/early childhood education affect their behavior and development. ARCADIA-Early Childhood draws on our team's prior work, including an IES-funded partnership with NYC Public Schools (NYCPS) to support the historic scale-up of the Pre-K for All program and a 10-year NICHD-funded trial of Smart Beginnings, a tiered school readiness parenting intervention launched from pediatric offices. Our current work includes a partnership with the NYCPS Arts Office to study Early Childhood Strings Pathways, a program that embeds violin instruction in Pre-K to Grade 2 classrooms to improve children’s musical fluency and support children’s growth in language, numeracy, and self-regulatory skills.

ARCADIA for Suicide Prevention takes a developmentally-informed, population-health approach to adolescent suicide. We focus on the places where adolescents already are (schools, primary care, emergency rooms), leverage trusted sources of support (peers, parents, trusted adults), are attuned to the developmental needs of adolescent autonomy and identity, and are guided by the ideas of youth themselves. Our focus is to strengthen bridges, integrating prevention and intervention within and across the places where youth are situated. We approach our work as a partnership between academia and public agencies to integrate seamlessly into practice at scale.

Baby's First Years: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Poverty Reduction - Hirokazu Yoshikawa

Baby’s First Years is the first study in the United States to assess the causal impact of poverty reduction on family life and children’s cognitive, emotional, and brain development. It is a randomized control trial that provides monthly, unconditional cash gifts (either $333/month or $20/month) to low-income mothers and their children in the first years of the child’s life. 
Core PIs: Drs. Kimberly Noble, Katherine Magnuson, Greg Duncan, Lisa Gennetian, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, Nathan Fox

B.A.L.L Research Collective - Dr. Gabriel Lockett

Founded by Dr. Lockett in 2025, the BALL Research Collective bridges research, advocacy, and community engagement through affirming, socially responsive scholarship grounded in care, justice, and empowerment. The collective promotes health equity by centering Black queer joy, wellness, and lived experience while developing culturally responsive approaches to research and practice. Its work is guided by four core values: belonging, advocacy, liberation, and love. Together, these values emphasize creating affirming spaces, advancing equity and systemic change, disrupting oppressive systems, and centering care, humanity, and relational accountability in scholarship and community engagement.

The Culture, Emotion, and Health Lab - Dr. William Tsai

The CEH lab studies how people regulate their emotions, cope with stress and how these processes lead to health and well-being. We focus our research questions on how cultural tendencies and values can shape the development and use of these processes. Our work is interdisciplinary, spanning across social, clinical, and health psychology. Recently, we have begun a line of research with ethnic minority cancer survivors, which is a population that experiences significant cancer health disparities. We are interested in applying cultural psychology theories with psychosocial interventions to overcome cultural barriers to reduce the undue burden of cancer experienced by ethnic minority cancer survivors.

Culture, Families, and Early Development Lab - Dr. Gigliana Melzi

Our research focuses on family practices and the role these play in young children’s early learning and development. We adopt a collaborative research stance, working in partnership with early childhood programs serving families from culturally and linguistically minoritized communities. The overarching goal of our work is to identify and understand the unique ways primary caregivers, especially those from Spanish-speaking and Spanish-English bilingual immigrant families, support their young children's early learning at home and at school.

Through our work, we contribute new knowledge to developmental science that centers Latine families’ voices, perspectives, and practices. The work conducted by the CFD team reflects our joint commitment to address systemic inequities faced by children from minoritized and marginalized communities in the US and Latin America.

Our work spans three main areas: Family Language and Literacy Practices, Family STEM Practices, and Family-School Connections.

Exploring People in Context - Dr. Selçuk Şirin

The EPIC lab aims to understand how children and youth develop in context to promote positive development across contexts. In particular, we use empirical methods with development in context as a general framework to better understand children’s and families’ needs and to arm professionals and policymakers with this knowledge to better address the needs of the most vulnerable. Through a multidisciplinary approach, we have investigated various aspects of marginalized youth's lives, including immigrant-origin children and families in New York, Muslim youth in the U.S., and refugees in Turkey, Jordan, and Norway.

The Homeplace Research Collective - Dr. Lauren Mims

The Homeplace Research Collective is a research lab at New York University that centers the lived experiences of Black children and their families through community-engaged, child-centered Black child developmental research. With various community partnerships (e.g., Black Girl programming, local schools, and policymakers), the Homeplace lab actively challenges systems of oppression to envision and co-create a world for Black children to thrive.

Specifically, the Homeplace lab adopts an "axiom of brilliance" in its research approach, consciously rejecting the historically misrepresented deficit framing of Black families. This rejection aims to counteract the perpetuation of misconceptions and stereotypes surrounding Black families and children. Homeplace conducts mixed methods research, to elucidate the contextualized, (i.e., promotive, and inhibitory factors) that shape the lived ecologies of Black families. We use tools of inquiry including interviews and focus groups to uplift and center the voices.

By disseminating research findings that resonate with the community and provide avenues for engagement, Homeplace contributes to the ongoing efforts to create more equitable and inclusive spaces for Black children and their families.

Home School Connections - Dr. Adina Schick

Broadly speaking, all of our projects address the socio-cultural context of children’s early literacy development, with a particular focus on children from culturally and/or linguistically diverse backgrounds. Our work spans two main areas: (1) ways in which classrooms can incorporate culturally grounded family practices to support children’s school-based learning, and (2) discourse and linguistic features of early literacy home and school interactions, in particular oral storytelling and book sharing between teachers and the children in their classes, as well as between caregivers and children. 

The Infant Studies of Language and Neurocognitive Development - Dr. Natalie Brito

We are the Infant Studies of Language and Neurocognitive Development Lab (ISLAND)! We are a developmental psychology lab that works with families to better understand the impact of the home environment and early social interactions on children’s development. We are particularly interested in children’s brain and behavioral development! In our work, we are committed to fostering an inclusive and supportive environment both in our lab as well as in our research. Our work is rooted in our ultimate goal to support families. Through our work, we hope to increase our understanding of how to empower caregivers and children during the first three years of life to foster healthy development.

Play & Language Lab - Dr. Catherine Tamis-LeMonda

The Play & Language Lab studies children’s learning and development in the first years of life, focusing on how social and cultural contexts shape the skills that children acquire and how they engage with their physical and social environments. Our observations of children and parents in structured tasks and in the natural setting of their home environments, provide us with rich video records for detailed coding of children, caregivers, and context.

Our ongoing projects include:

• Temporal Structure of Behavior (NSF-funded). A collaborative research
  initiative examining how behaviors in infants and caregivers unfold
  ‘locally’ (from moment to moment) and ‘globally’ across extended time
  scales of 1- to 2-hour home activities. Focus is on how coordination in
  the contingencies between infant vocalizations and maternal speech
  coordination in the broader rhythms of language interactions and object
  play relate to learning.
• Play and Learning Across a Year (PLAY) (NIH-funded): A collaborative
  research initiative across 50 universities on the behaviors of infants and
  mothers during natural activity in their homes. Data on over 900 infants
  and mothers from across the U.S. include transcribed and annotated
  videos, parent report questionnaires, video tours of homes, digital
  recordings of ambient noise, and detailed demographic information.
• Everyday Learning (NSF-funded): A study of 2- to 3-year-olds’ math
  learning and interactions with mothers and fathers. We examine parent-
  child interactions, talk about number and spatial concepts, children’s
  math understanding, parents’ math beliefs and childrearing values, and
  families’ home environments (for example, the toys available to children
  at home).
• Routine Math BABIES (Babies Activities and Behaviors in Everyday
  Settings) (NSF & Robinhood Foundation funded). A set of studies on
  how the physical home environment and everyday home activities
  support toddlers’ developing understanding and production of words for
  concepts such as number and space in English- and Mandarin-speaking
  families. Our basic research findings form the basis for culturally-
  grounded intervention work that provides parents with strategies on
  ways to infuse math language in everyday routines (e.g., counting
  grapes, naming shapes, talking about objects that are bigger, heavier).

The Project for the Advancement of our Common Humanity - Dr. Niobe Way

PACH is an emerging think tank, funded by the NoVo Foundation and based at New York University, that is designed to engage researchers, policymakers, practitioners, activists, educators, artists, and journalists in a series of conversations focused on what we have learned from science and practice regarding what lies at the root of our crisis of connection and what we can do to create a more just and humane world. PACH entails a public lecture series and monthly conversations with 50 senior-level professionals.

The Researching Inequity in Society Ecologically (RISE) - Drs. Erin Godfrey and Shabnam Javdani

The team’s research and activities serve traditionally marginalized populations, focusing on health and mental health disparities in women and youth who are involved or at risk of involvement with the justice system. As such, the RISE Team takes a contextual, multi-level, and interdisciplinary approach to systems change and implements evidence-based practices that promote health and well-being, working closely with community partners to bridge the gap between research and practice.

SAFE Spaces: Systems Aligning For Equity - Drs. Shabnam Javdani & Erin Godfey

Developed in partnership with the NYC Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), SAFE Spaces uses evidence-based principles to provide training and coaching support for frontline staff working in ACS Close to Home (CTH) non-secure and limited-secure placement facilities.

Through unique skills-based staff training activities and guidance from a trained coach, SAFE Spaces aims to increase the professional development, job satisfaction, retention, and well-being of CTH staff who work directly with youth. By focusing on these staff outcomes and the environment in which they work, we also help to promote and encourage a healthier environment for youth’s lives and promote their safety, well-being and positive development. The efficacy of SAFE Spaces is being assessed through a cluster-randomized control trial supported by the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH). 

SAIL Lab - Dr. Andrew Koepp

SAIL stands for Self-Regulation and Attention in Learning environments.

We use approaches from developmental psychology to understand how parents and educators can create the conditions for children to best apply skills like self-regulation to support learning. Together with traditional classroom observations, we use intensive behavioral data from wearable devices to “zoom in” on children’s everyday experiences in these within-child studies.  We also conduct longitudinal analyses of secondary datasets from the US and Brazil to “zoom out” on development and investigate contextual influences on children’s development more broadly.

Science of Human Connection Lab - Dr. Niobe Way

Research in the Science of Human Connection Lab examines the intersections of culture, context, and human development, with a particular focus on the social and emotional development of children and adolescents. Starting from the recognition of children’s innate and remarkable capacity to connect with those around them, we employ a mixed methods approach to understanding how children’s relational strengths (e.g., interpersonal curiosity) may be fostered and leveraged to create a more just, humane, and connected world.