It is my sad duty to report that our beloved colleague, Lauren Bernstein Adamson, died December 31, 2021. Lauren was a life-long member of the International Congress for Infant Studies, having attended its inaugural meeting in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1978. A Berkley PhD, early in her career she worked with T. Barry Brazelton, Ed Tronick, and Heidi Als as they were developing the still-face paradigm. She joined Georgia State University’s Psychology department in 1980 and began the series of studies of dyadic joint engagement and infant joint attention for which she is best known. Throughout her career she was supported first by the National Science Foundation and then by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, among other granting agencies. She began studying typically developing infants with their mothers and peers and, later, to comparing the development of infants with Autism and Down syndrome with typically developing infants. At first she focused on the sharing of objects and events seen jointly by mothers and their infants, and more recently on objects and events jointly heard as well. Throughout her career she was an active reviewer for journals and for granting agencies, a generous mentor to students and junior colleagues, and a conscientious collaborator with colleagues. She will be remembered for the high intellectual standards to which she held herself and others and for her intellectual and personal warmth and generosity.
Contributed by
Roger Bakeman
Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Georgia State University
