It is with great sorrow I inform you of the death of Dr. Lewis P. Lipsitt, a founding member of the International Congress for Infant Studies and a pioneer in the field of Infancy. Lewis Lipsitt died at on Thursday, September 30, 2021.
In the field of Infancy, Lewis (or “Lew” as he was widely known) authored seminal papers on infant sensation, perception, and learning, as well as on perinatal risk and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. He also conducted important longitudinal studies examining how early life experiences influenced later outcomes. Across his lifetime, he conducted a longitudinal research project, originally involving 4,000 births in Providence. The participants are now over 60 years old. The work was groundbreaking for the field examining effects of parental smoking on fetal and infant development and also tracking the progress of children with learning disabilities.

A developmental psychologist, Dr. Lipsitt received his B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1950, his M.S. in clinical and social psychology from the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) in 1952, and his Ph.D. in child psychology from the University of Iowa (Iowa City) in 1957. He spent his career at Brown University starting in 1957 in the Department of Psychology. In 1967 he was the founding director of Brown University’s Child Study Center.

He received many accolades during his long and illustrious career. He was a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of London’s Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, and a Cattell Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He received the Nicholas Hobbs Award for “science in the service of children” in 1990 from the American Psychological Association (APA), and won the 1994 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Lifetime Achievement Mentor Award for his work with minority persons and women in the pursuit of scientific careers. He was honored by New England Psychological Association, with the Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award, and received the Musiker-Merenda award for mental health services to Rhode Island. He was a Fellow of the American Psychological Society (APS), for which he was a founding executive board member. In 1995 Dr. Lipsitt received a Professional Achievement Award from his undergraduate alma mater, the University of Chicago.

Later in his career, after his groundbreaking work on infant studies, he turned his attention to adolescent risk behaviors. Lipsitt was a visiting scientist at the National Institute of Mental Health in 1986-87, studying psychopathological risk-taking. With Alvin Poussaint, M.D., Dr. Lipsitt co-directed the Lee Salk Center of KIDSPEACE, a national center for young people overcoming crises.

Dr. Lipsitt was a passionate science communicator. He pioneered ways of disseminating scientific findings about infants and children. As editor of the Brown University Child and Adolescent Behavior Letter for 15 years, his Newsbriefs appeared in the Sesame Street Parents Guide. He was a consultant to a WNET documentary TV series, and has served on advisory boards of BabyTalk and Child magazines.

Dr. Lipsitt also contributed to the field through his service to professional societies. Over his long career, he served as president of the Eastern Psychological Association, president of APA’s Division of Developmental Psychology, and also president of the Division of General Psychology, and was elected to the APA Council of Representatives for four terms. He also chaired APA’s board of scientific affairs, and was the APA executive director for science.

For those of us in the International Congress of Infant Studies (ICIS) society it is his role as a member of the founding generation of ICIS that must be highlighted as a major and enduring achievement. The founding generation of ICIS implemented the vision to advance science and support colleagueship in the interdisciplinary field of infant development. ICIS was the outgrowth of a small group of scientists studying infant learning and development who met monthly to share their work, and eventually organized an off-SRCD-year meeting attended by a larger group of researchers. Lipsitt organized the first formal meeting of the ICIS (as it was named), which was held in Providence Rhode Island in 1978. There Lew did a yoyo demonstration and provided a souvenir yoyos to conference goers. He was a yoyo expert and enjoyed sharing stunning tricks. Dr. Lipsitt also founded the society’s flagship journal Infant Behavior and Development (currently Infancy), and founded the Advances in Child Development and Behavior in 1963. He was passionate about the important role that scientists play in understanding Infancy in order to support long-term positive outcomes for children and families.

Dr. Lipsitt was exuberant and joyful about the privilege that it was to be an Infancy Researcher. All Infancy Scientists were touched by his leadership, commitment, and enthusiasm for the field. His joy, wonder, and curiosity about infants was contagious. He will truly be missed.

On August 8, our field lost a giant, Lila Ruth Gleitman.  Lila’s work altered our understanding of the human mind through her elegant theoretical and empirical investigations of early language development.  Redefining and broadening the field, she asked not only what children say, but also what they understand. With this wide lens, she demonstrated the robustness of the human language system. The inherent properties of mind allow language to emerge in the face of deafness and blindness and allow young children to learn abstract words such as thinking and believing in the absence of clear perceptual referents.  Well before it was fashionable to be interdisciplinary, Lila forged ties that now inextricably bind linguistics to psychology. In many ways she was the matriarch of the study of child language.

A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Lila won the American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientist Award, the American Association for the Advancement of Science John McGovern Award in the Behavioral Sciences, the Prix International from the Fyssen Foundation and the Rumelhart Prize from the Cognitive Science Society.  Her work not only has had an impact on a wide range of scientific disciplines, but also includes numerous papers that have been cited over one thousand times. Her contributions to the fields of linguistics and cognitive science are incalculable.

Lila mentored many in the field with her inspirational style, her clear vision, her legendary humor and her deep intellect.  She wrestled with questions that have puzzled philosophers for a millennium and she made progress on them through her creative research approach.  As a mentor, she helped everyone in her orbit learn more, think better and contribute to a broader purpose.  

Lila Gleitman is truly an intellectual entrepreneur.  She gave us all a gift that will keep giving in the form of her remarkable wit and wisdom, and a suite of ideas and theories that will keep us all busy for generations to come. To those of us who knew her and loved her, the 91-year-old Lila, who just published her book Sentence First, Arguments Later (Oxford Press, 2020) and a forthcoming paper for the Annual Review of Psychology with her daughter Claire, will forever be The Notorious LRG.

Contributed by

Jerome Kagan passed away on Monday, May 10, 2021. He was 92 years old.

Jerry was born in Newark, New Jersey and grew up in Rahway. He received his BA from Rutgers University before obtaining his PhD from Yale where he studied with Frank Beach.  He then joined the Fels Research Institute in Yellow Springs, Ohio where his significant longitudinal research that produced Birth to Maturity was published in 1962.  He then accepted an offer from Harvard University to assist in establishing its program in human development. There, he was named the Daniel and Amy Starch Research Professor of Psychology.  Over a 60-year career, Jerry used his keen insight and endless imagination to capture the nuances of children’s lives across time and context. A voracious reader, his bookshelves were filled with volumes on biology, physics, philosophy, history, language, neuroscience, poetry, and biography.  He believed that psychology was a “young science” and that researchers should adopt a biologist’s eye to describing and understanding behavior.

Jerry had a long and distinguished academic career, as a pioneer in the fields of infant studies, particularly emotional and moral development.  He may be best known for his work on temperament, providing the first descriptions of Behavioral Inhibition and linking the biology of this temperament trait to then current work on the neuroscience of fear and anxiety.  Among his numerous awards are the Hofheimer Prize from the American Psychiatric Association and the G. Stanley Hall Award from the American Psychological Association in 1985.

Jerry was a prolific author with hundreds of publications and numerous books.  Indeed, his last volume was published this year, A Trio of Pursuits: Puzzles in Human Development (2021). 

Above all, Jerry always had a boundless enthusiasm for science and never lost his fascination with the world around him.  He was known for the unexpected email expounding on a recent paper, quizzing an author’s inexact formulation of a construct, or sending a hearty congratulations.  He considered the scientific enterprise the source of life’s excitement. As his many students remember, you would walk into his office and he would boom out, “What did you discover today?!” and you never wished to disappoint.

He is survived by his daughter Janet, grand-daughter Leah and her husband Jon, and his great-grandson James.  His wife of 70 years, Cele, passed away in 2020.

Contributed by

Dear Colleagues: We write with the sad news that Frances Degen Horowitz passed away on Monday, March 15, 2021. She was 88 years old. Frances was President Emerita and University Professor at the Graduate School and University Center of CUNY, and a former Department Chair (Human Development and Family Life), Associate Dean (College of Liberal Arts and Sciences), and Vice Chancellor (Research, Graduate Studies and Public Service) at the University of Kansas. Frances made seminal contributions to developmental psychology and was among the founders of the field of infant studies. After attending Antioch College, Frances completed her doctoral training at the famed Iowa Child Welfare Research Station and trained with Boyd McCandless. Frances’ interests in learning theory and individual differences first emerged there, and that theme continued throughout her career. In the 1970s she devised the infant-controlled habituation paradigm now known and used throughout the field to study early perceptual and cognitive development. She laid the groundwork for and promoted the study of interactions between infants/children and their caregivers as a major determinant of developmental outcome, championed the study of preterm infants, and was responsible for the promulgation of methods for measuring the neurobehavioral status of newborns, including the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale. Of the 130 books and articles she published, many are still well-cited classics in the field. Frances was active in numerous professional organizations promoting behavioral and developmental science, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association (APA), the American Psychological Society, and the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD), and the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development. She served as President of Division 7 (Developmental Psychology) of the APA, the American Psychological Foundation, and as President of SRCD. She served on numerous editorial boards during her career, and was editor of the SRCD Monographs from 1976-1982. She was widely renowned for her rigorous and meticulous scholarship and for her unfailingly kind — yet uncompromising and exacting – mentorship. Her influence on the field is evident through her legacy of students and published work, but perhaps just as importantly through her promotion of translating developmental science directly to benefit well-being of infants and children across the world.

Contributed by