Nathan A. Fox

Nathan A. Fox is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology. He has completed research on the biological bases of social and emotional behavior developing methods for assessing brain activity in infants and young children during tasks designed to elicit a range of emotions. His work on the temperamental antecedents of anxiety is funded by the National Institutes of Health where he was awarded a MERIT award for excellence of this research program. He is also a Principal Investigator on the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, a randomized trial to determine the efficacy of family care for infants with a history of abandonment and institutionalization. Dr. Fox is an elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Psychological Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received the Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award from the Society for Research in Child Development and the Distinguished Mentor Award and G. Stanley Hall Award for Lifelong Achievement in Developmental Science from Division 7 of the American Psychological Association. He is also the recipient in 2017 of the Ruane Award for Outstanding Research in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and is a founding member of the National Scientific Council for the Developing Child where he is co-Scientific Director of this group.

Susan C. Levine, Ph.D.

Susan C. Levine, Ph.D., is the Rebecca Anne Boylan Distinguished Service Professor in Education and Society in the Departments of Psychology, Comparative Human Development, and the Committee on Education at the University of Chicago. She received her Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics, Psychology and Education at Simmons College and a Ph.D. in Psychology at M.I.T. Her research examines the development of mathematical thinking, the relation of numerical and spatial thinking, and how variations in math learning experiences at home and at school affect this development. In another line of research, she studies the development of emotions and attitudes about math and their relation to math learning outcomes. Finally, she studies the potential of various kinds of interventions, including parent-child engagement with mathematical books, play activities, and technology, to enhance children’s math learning. She served as a co-PI of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center, an NSF Science of Learning Center and is currently a member of the Development and Research in Early Math Education (DREME) network. She received the Ann L. Brown Award for Excellence in Developmental Research and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Association for Psychological Science, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Elizabeth Bonawitz

Elizabeth Bonawitz is the David J. Vitale Associate Professor of Learning Sciences at Harvard University. Her work focuses on the basic science theories of learning with the broader goal of informing educational practice. Her research bridges two research traditions: cognitive development and computational modeling. Specifically, Bonawitz’s empirical approach focus on the structure of children's early causal beliefs, how evidence and prior beliefs interact to affect children's learning, the developmental processes that influence children's belief revision and curiosity, and the role of social factors (such as learning from others) in guiding learning. Bonawitz received her Ph.D. from MIT in the brain in cognitive sciences in 2009 working with Dr. Laura Schulz. She then completed a post-doctoral fellowship at University of California, Berkeley with Thomas Griffiths and Alison Gopnik (2009-2013). She was an Assistant and Associate professor of psychology at Rutgers University, Newark from 2013 until 2020 when she moved to Harvard. Bonawitz is the recipient of the James McDonnell Foundation Understanding Human Cognition Scholar Award and the Jacobs Early Career Research Fellowship. Her work is additionally currently funded by several NSF grants, the Caplan Foundation, and the Templeton Foundation. Her research has been published in top journals in psychology, cognitive science, and education. Additionally, she has served as Associate Editor for Cognitive Science (journal) and is on the governing board of the Cognitive Development Society and Children Helping Science.

Kou Murayama

Kou Murayama is a Professor for Educational Psychology at the Hector Research Institute of Education Sciences and Psychology. In 2020, he has been awarded with the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Professorship.

Kou Murayama's research focuses on a number of overlapping questions about how motivation works in human functioning. With his broad and interdisciplinary background both in basic and applied (especially educational) sciences, his research program features a “multimethod approach”, combining a number of different perspectives, and methodologies (e.g., longitudinal modeling, behavioral experiments, neuroimaging, ecological momentary assessments, meta-analysis, educational intervention, computational/statistical simulation) to gain a comprehensive understanding of motivation. One of the central themes of his recent work is to understand how humans are autonomously motivated to seek and gain knowledge (motivational state often called “interest” or “intrinsic motivation”) and how we can apply this idea to educational settings.