ICIS 2026 Speakers

Chen Yu is the Charles and Sarah Seay Regents Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, with a faculty affiliation in Computer Science. His research combines developmental psychology, cognitive science, and computational modeling to examine how children learn language, direct attention, and acquire knowledge in everyday settings. By analyzing high-density, multimodal data, his work uncovers the mechanisms of early learning, advances theories of cognitive and social development, and informs practical strategies to support children’s growth.

Gustaf Gredebäck is a Professor of Developmental Psychology at Uppsala University and a member of the Uppsala Child and BabyLab. His work focuses on how infants learn through exploration and social perception, with particular emphasis on attention, action understanding, and joint attention during the first years of life. 

In recent years his work has expanded to also focus on risk and protective factors for children growing up in poverty, during war, with the consequences of global warming, with parents that suffer from poor mental health, and for children that live in transitioning societies. Ongoing projects include collaborations with researchers in Bhutan, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, Paraguay, Taiwan, Turkey, Uganda, and Zimbabwe in addition to continued work in Uppsala, Sweden.

Leher Singh is an infant researcher whose work examines early language, cognitive, and social development in infancy, with a particular focus on global diversification, representation, and equity in infant research. Her scholarship addresses how infants learn from the language and social environments around them, and how developmental measures should be interpreted across culturally and linguistically diverse contexts. A central theme of her work is the need to broaden the global research enterprise in infant development beyond historically overrepresented populations. She has worked extensively with large-scale data in Southeast Asia, involving many infants and families from diverse linguistic, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Her work also focuses on addressing the structural and systemic barriers that have limited the inclusion and visibility of scholars, families, and research settings in the Global South. She has led multiple special issues focused on advancing infant research in the Global South and on expanding the field’s theoretical, methodological, and geographic foundations. 

Karen Adolph is Julius Silver Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and Professor of Applied Psychology and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at NYU. She uses observable motor behaviors to study developmental processes. Adolph directs the Databrary  video library and the PLAY Project, and maintains the Datavyu video-annotation tool. She is an APA, APS, and AAAS Fellow and Past-President of ICIS. She received the Kurt Koffka Medal, Cattell Sabbatical Award, APF Fantz Memorial Award, APA Boyd McCandless Award, ICIS Young Investigator Award, FIRST and MERIT awards from NICHD, and five teaching awards from NYU.

Dr. Koraly Pérez-Edgar is the McCourtney Professor of Child Studies and a Professor of Psychology at The Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on temperament, socioemotional development, and the early emergence of anxiety. Dr. Pérez-Edgar work examines how individual differences in attention, emotion, and self-regulation shape developmental pathways across childhood and adolescence, using multi-method approaches that integrate behavioral, psychophysiological, and contextual measures. She is an APS fellow and a recipient of the APA Division 7 mentor award. Dr. Pérez-Edgar is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Developmental Psychology.

Marigen Narea, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and a Principal Investigator at the Center for Educational Justice. Trained in social policy and developmental science (LSE, Boston University, PUC-Chile). She was a Luksic Visiting Scholar (2024–2025) at Harvard University. She studies parenting, the quality of early childhood education, and the impacts of early childhood policies in contexts of inequality. She leads Mil Primeros Días, a longitudinal study following over 1,000 families in Chile since infancy. Her work combines longitudinal surveys and policy-relevant evaluations to advance global understanding of early development in Latin America.

Masako Myowa received her Ph.D. from Kyoto University, Japan, in 1999. From 2007 to 2014 she was an Associate Professor of Kyoto University and since 2014, she has been a Professor of Kyoto University. Her research interests include the emergence and development of human social cognition and its evolutionary foundations. She adopts a comparative cognitive developmental science approach, examining cognitive development in humans and non-human primates beginning in the prenatal period. This perspective helps reveal the biological foundations of human cognition, highlighting both features shared with other primates and those unique to humans.

Nick Turk-Browne is the Susan Nolen-Hoeksema Professor of Psychology and Director of the Wu Tsai Institute at Yale University. His research uses behavioral studies, brain imaging, intracranial recording, and computational modeling to understand how cognitive and neural systems develop and interact. He has published extensively on perception, attention, learning, and memory, and his lab has pioneered techniques for brain imaging in awake infants. He received young investigator awards from the Vision Sciences Society, Cognitive Neuroscience Society, Society of Experimental Psychologists, and American Psychological Association, as well as the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr Renate Strehlau is a Clinician Scientist based in Johannesburg, South Africa, with nearly two decades of research experience in child health. Her work focuses primarily on the prevention and management of paediatric and maternal infectious diseases, with a particular interest in childhood neurodevelopment among children living with or exposed to HIV.

Dr Strehlau has served as the lead clinician on multiple multinational clinical trials, as well as studies conducted within interdisciplinary team frameworks. More recently, her research has expanded to examine the effects of heat exposure on childhood illness and developmental outcomes.

She currently leads the Wits VIDA Nkanyezi Research Unit, located at South Africa’s only dedicated maternal and child hospital, and holds a lecturer position in the Department of Paediatrics at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Biography coming soon…