Ph.D. program in Psychology @ University of Texas at Dallas

Interested in developmental psychology? Consider applying to the Ph.D. program in Psychology at the University of Texas at Dallas. Prospective students are encouraged to contact faculty members of interest. But for more general information about the program, please go to: http://www.utdallas.edu/bbs/degrees/psy-degrees/ Or contact Kim Cosner, Academic Support Coordinator at psysciencesphd@utdallas.edu. Applications are due December 1st. The following researchers with interests related to child development are recruiting new doctoral students for the upcoming academic year:

Shayla Holub (sholub@utdallas.edu). Dr. Holub leads the Healthy Development Project—a lab that focuses on how families socialize healthy eating habits and healthy body size attitudes in young children. Her research examines various self-related cognitions, including perceived competence and body esteem. Ongoing research examines the development of prejudice, specifically the preconceptions children hold because of others’ weight, and how to lessen weight bias.  http://healthydevelopmentproject.utdallas.edu

Mandy Maguire (mandy.maguire@utdallas.edu). Dr. Maguire leads the Developmental Neurolinguistics lab, which uses EEG to study how the brain supports typical language development. Her current research, funded by NSF, is related to how a childhood in poverty impacts brain and language development, specifically vocabulary growth, in grade schoolers (ages 8-15).  https://www.utdallas.edu/bbs/brainlab/

Candice Mills (candice.mills@utdallas.edu). Dr. Mills leads the Think Lab, which examines how children learn from others. Central to much of her research is how children engage in the process of inquiry: how children evaluate what they know and don’t know, how they seek out new information in response to gaps in their knowledge, and how they make sense of the answers they receive to questions. An ongoing NSF grant examines how elementary school-aged children learn about science through explanations from others. http://www.utdallas.edu/thinklab/

Jackie Nelson (jackie.nelson@utdallas.edu). Dr. Nelson leads the Family Research Lab, which focuses on family relationships and processes. Her research examines associations between parenting, conflict, family stress, emotion socialization, and children’s social-emotional development. Ongoing research examines daily family stressors and mealtime interactions among parents and preschoolers.  https://labs.utdallas.edu/familyresearchlab/

Margaret Owen (mowen@utdallas.edu; http://ccf.utdallas.edu). Dr. Owen’s Children and Families Lab is examining children’s self-regulation and executive function skills, school readiness and later achievement in low-income African American and Hispanic children followed longitudinally from early childhood through the transition to middle school. With federal grant funding, the study is examining the children’s developmental trajectories across multiple domains in contexts of their family relationships, cultural socialization, and school experiences in this unique and diverse sample. https://bbs.utdallas.edu/children-and-families-lab/

Melanie Spence (mspence@utdallas.edu). Dr. Spence studies the development of young infants' perception of communicative signals. Her research includes studying young infants’ discrimination of infant-directed speech (IDS) signals that communicate different emotions and intent, as well as how facial motion and emotion affect infants’ attention to speech and faces. Opportunities exist within the lab, the Infant Learning Project, to collaborate with others who have expertise in speech sciences. http://www.utdallas.edu/bbs/ilp/