Dr. Sandra Waxman, the Louis W. Menk Chair in Psychology, director of the Infant and Child Development Center, is a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, and a founder of Innovations in Developmental Science, all at Northwestern University.

Waxman’s research is designed to illuminate infants’ and young children’s natural ability to build complex, flexible, and creative cognitive and linguistic systems. A leader in building research and community partnerships, she has considered development in children from diverse cultural and language communities, both within the US and abroad.

Waxman considers the relation between language and cognition — two fundamentally human systems — across development. She identifies which cognitive and linguistic capacities are available to infants from the very start, and how these are sculpted by the language(s) in which they are immersed, the objects and events with which they engage, and the people who care for them. This work, interdisciplinary to its core, engages the dynamic interplay between nature and nurture, twin engines that together fuel human development.

Waxman's research has considered three distinct, but interrelated, questions:

• How do language and cognition come together in the infant mind?
• How do children across the worlds’ communities learn about the natural world and our place within it?
• How do children learn, for better or worse, about social bias?
  

In all three domains, Waxman highlights the power of tracing the infants' earliest capacities and how these unfold within the diverse contexts that constitute the human condition. This diversity is essential if we are to support development for all children.

Waxman is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Ann L. Brown Award for Excellence in Developmental Research. She is co-editor of the Annual Review of Developmental Psychology and spearheaded the development of new language measures for the NIH’s Infant and Toddler Toolbox. Committed to sharing developmental science with policy-makers and the public, her work has been published in top-tier scientific journals, featured in mainstream media, and applied to policy to support early development.