ICIS 2025 Speakers
The theme of ICIS 2025 is Infancy in Context, with a program that is global, integrative and multidisciplinary in nature. Our speakers come from every continent, and from a range of disciplines.
Keynote Speakers
Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz
CNRS, Robert Debré Child brain Institute, France
Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz, M.D., Ph.D., is a pediatrician and Senior Research Director at CNRS (France). She leads the Child Brain Institute at Robert-Debré Hospital in Paris and the Developmental Brain Imaging Laboratory at NeuroSpin (Université Paris-Saclay, CEA). Her research uses non-invasive brain imaging (fMRI and high-density EEG) to study cognitive development in infants and children, focusing on the neural foundations of language and learning. Her work shows that core aspects of human brain organization are present before birth and actively shape early learning. She was elected a Foreign Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Hirokazu Yoshikawa
New York University
Hirokazu Yoshikawa is the Courtney Sale Ross Professor of Globalization and Education and a University Professor at NYU. Trained as a community and developmental psychologist, he studies programs and policies related to early childhood development, immigration, poverty reduction and youth gender and sexuality in the United States as well as in South Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.
He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2025 was the recipient of the Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize of the Jacobs Foundation.
Invited Speakers
Chen Yu
University of Texas at Austin, United States
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
Uppsala Child and Babylab, Department of Psychology, Uppsala University, Sweden
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.
Karen Adolph
New York University, United States
Biography coming soon…
Koraly Perez-Edgar
The Pennsylvania State University, United States
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.
Linda Richter
University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
Linda Richter (PhD), a Developmental Psychologist, was the Inaugural Director and now a Distinguished Professor in the Centre of Excellence in Human Development at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Previously, she headed the Child, Youth and Family Development Programme at the Human Sciences Research Council; held Professorships at three South African Universities; was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard (USA), Melbourne (Aus) and Oxford (UK) Universities, and for 3 years, served as Advisor on Vulnerable Children at the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in Geneva. She has published +400 scientific and policy papers; is the co-Principal Investigator of Birth to Forty (Bt40) a 35-year long birth cohort study of +3000 children; led the drafting of SA’s Integrated Early Childhood Development Policy (adopted by Cabinet 2015); the 2017 Lancet Series Advancing Early Child Development: From Science to Scale and currently, global country profiles of early childhood development. She has Life-Time Achievement awards from both the Medical Research Council (2015) and the National Research Foundation (2021 and is a thrice NRF A-rated scientist.
Marigen Narea
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile
Biography coming soon…
Masako Myowa
Kyoto University, Japan
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
Yale University, United States
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.
Sandy Waxman
Northwestern University, United States
Dr. Sandra Waxman is the Louis W. Menk Chair in Psychology, director of the Infant and Child Development Center, Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, and co-founder of Innovations in Developmental Science at Northwestern University. Her research focusses on early language and cognitive development, and the links between them. Adopting a developmental, cross-linguistic and cross-cultural lens, she asks what cognitive and linguistic capacities are available to infants from the very start, and how these are shaped by experience.
Waxman is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has received numerous awards, including from the Guggenheim and Cattell Foundations. Her research has been funded continuously by US 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 of the board of the Social Policy Report (SRCD) and as an ICIS board member.
Stanislas Dehaene
CEA, France
Biography coming soon…