Child Development Faculty

Carl Barenboim, Psychology – BA, Clark University. PhD, University of Rochester. Special interest in the child’s developing ability to reason about the social world, as well as the relation between children’s social thinking and social behavior; articles and chapters on children’s perspectivetaking, person perception, interpersonal problem solving, and the ability to infer carelessness in others; past member, Board of Consulting Editors, Developmental Psychology; principal investigator, grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. SLC, 1988-

Robert Desjarlais, Anthropology – BA,University of Massachusetts-Amherst. MA, PhD, University of California-Los Angeles. Special interests in the cultural construction of experience and subjectivity, the political economy of illness and healing, and language and power in complex societies; ethnographic fieldwork in the Nepal Himalayas and with the residents of a homeless shelter in Boston; author of Body and Emotion: The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in the Nepal Himalayas; Shelter Blues; Sanity and Selfhood Among the Homeless; and Sensory Biographies: Lives and Deaths Among Nepal’s Yolmo Buddhists. Recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a Howard fellowship. NIMH postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School. SLC, 1994-

Jan Drucker, Psychology – BA, Radcliffe College. PhD, New York University. Clinical and developmental psychologist with teaching and research interests in the areas of developmental and educational theory; child development; parent guidance; clinical assessment and therapy with children and adolescents; and the development of imaginative play and other symbolic processes in early childhood and their impact on later development. Professional writings have centered on various forms of early symbolization in development and in clinical work with children. SLC, 1972-

Kim Ferguson, Psychology – BA, Knox College. MA, PhD, Cornell University. Special interests include culturalecological approaches to infant and child development, children at risk (children in poverty, HIV/AIDS orphans, children in foster care and institutionalized care), health and cognitive development, and development in African contexts. Areas of academic specialization include infant categorization development and the influences of the task, the stimuli used, and infants’ culture, language, and socioeconomic status on their performance; infant face processing in African and American contexts; and relationships between the quality of southern African orphan care contexts and child outcomes. SLC, 2007-

Elizabeth Johnston, Psychology – MA, St. Andrew’s University, Scotland. DPhil, Oxford University. Special interests in human perception of three-dimensional shape, binocular vision, and the perception of depth from motion; author of articles and book chapters on shape perception from stereopsis, sensorimotor integration, and combining depth information from different sources. SLC, 1992-

Linwood J. Lewis, Psychology– BA, Manhattanville College. MA, PhD, City University of New York. MS, Columbia University. Special interests in the effects of culture and social context on conceptualization of health and illness, multicultural aspects of genetic counseling, the negotiation of HIV within families, and the development of sexuality in ethnic minority adolescents and adults. Recipient of a MacArthur postdoctoral fellowship and an NIH-NRSA research fellowship. SLC, 1997-

Barbara Schecter, Director, Graduate Program in Child Development/Psychology (on leave yearlong) – BA, Sarah Lawrence College. MA, PhD, Teachers College, Columbia University. Developmental psychologist with special interest in cultural psychology, developmental theories, and language and development; author and researcher on cultural issues in development and metaphoric thinking in children. SLC, 1985-