Kirby Deater-Deckard, Ph.D.,
is Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst,, and a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. Dr. Deater-Deckard conducts research and teaches courses on biological and environmental influences on individual differences in social-emotional and cognitive development in childhood and adolescence. The emphasis in this work is on intergenerational transmission, gene-environment mechanisms, and home and school environments. His publications span developmental and family sciences and developmental psychopathology areas, with research currently and previously funded by NSF and NIH. Applications focus on parenting stress: identifying its antecedents and consequences, its adaptive and maladaptive features, and implications for parenting prevention and intervention programs. In his current collaborative work on parenting, he is examining maternal cognitive and physiological self-regulation and its role in parenting stress and harsh caregiving, in the face of challenging child behavior and contextual stressors.

Robin Panneton, Ph.D.,
amily: is Associate Professor of Psychology, member of the Faculty of Health Sciences, and an affiliated member of the School of Neuroscience at Virginia Tech. Dr. Panneton conducts research on the processes and mechanisms of how infants learn to communicate in the first two years after birth. Predominantly, she is interested in how information available from caretakers is attended to, processed, and remembered by infants as they begin their pathways to being language users. With the support of funding from NICHD and the James S. McDonnell Foundation, she has looked at voice recognition, processing of intonational contours, integration of information across facial and vocal displays, attention modulation via emotional information in speaker's faces and voices, and early indicators of individual differences in learning styles as they relate to emerging language skills in low- and high-risk infants. In her teaching, she has concentrated on dynamic systems view of development, epigenetics, pre- and post-natal contributions to early human development, language learning, and the development of attention in infancy and early childhood.

Integrates research across genetic, epigenetic, physiological, and neuroendocrine systems

Focuses on intergenerational transmission of adaptive and maladaptive functioning

Synthesizes effects of pre- and postnatal environments and their interactions with biological factors

Incorporates cross-disciplinary perspectives involving biologic, behavioral, family-level, and contextual mechanisms and processes related to stress