Dr. Sandra Waxman is the Louis W. Menk Chair in Psychology, director of the Infant and Child Development Center, Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, and co-founder of Innovations in Developmental Science at Northwestern University. Her work is focused on early language and cognitive development, and how these come together in the mind. Adopting a developmental, lens, she asks how infants’ early capacities set the stage for later development, including adolescence. Adopting a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural lens, she asks what cognitive and linguistic capacities are available to infants and young children from the very start, and how these are shaped by experience. Her work serves as a springboard for promoting positive developmental outcomes in all children and youth.
Waxman is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has received numerous awards, including awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Cattell Foundation and US federal funding agencies (NIH; NSF). She is founding co-editor of the Annual Review of Developmental Science. Committed to sharing developmental science with policymakers and the public, she served on the steering committee for the Social Policy Report of the Society of Research in Child Development (SRCD) and as a board member of the International Conference of Infant Studies. Her work appears in numerous scientific and media outlets.