Institution: New York University

Hirokazu Yoshikawa is the Courtney Sale Ross Professor of Globalization and Education at New York University Steinhardt and a University Professor at NYU. He is Co-Director, with Larry Aber, of the Global TIES for Children Center at NYU. He is a community and developmental psychologist who studies the effects of public policies and programs related to immigration, early childhood, and poverty reduction on children’s development in low- and middle-income countries and in the United States. Since 2013 he has co-chaired the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) Thematic Network on Early Childhood Development and Education and has led SDSN work in Early Childhood Development. He serves on the Boards of the Russell Sage Foundation and the Foundation for Child Development, and on the advisory boards of the Open Society Foundations Early Childhood Program and the UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report.

Catherine Tamis-LeMonda is Professor of Applied Psychology at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education, Culture, and Human Development. Her research is focused on infant and toddler learning and development among diverse populations in the United States and in Europe, Central Asia and East Asia. Her research considers the development and contexts of young children’s language and communication, object play, cognition, motor skills, gender identity, emotion regulation, and social understanding, and the long term implications of early emerging skills for children’s developmental trajectories. She investigates how skills in different domains reciprocally affect one another and snowball over time (that is, the theoretical construct of developmental cascades), and examines the role of socio-cultural context on early development. A core emphasis of this research is on the quality of mothers and fathers interactions with children  in particular their contingent responsiveness and richness of child-directed language in relation to children’s development and, conversely, how emerging communicative skills in children influence their everyday learning experiences and interactions with parents.