Faculty Members

Dr. Susan Gelman          Conceptual Development Lab

Susan Gelman studies concepts and language in young children. She is especially interested in how children organize their experience into categories, how categories guide children’s reasoning, how children discover and reason about non-obvious aspects of the world, and the role of language in these processes.

Dr. Nicole Gardner-Neblett          VOCALL Lab

Nicole Gardner-Neblett studies the individual and contextual factors that promote children’s language and literacy development. In particular, her work includes examining African American children’s development of complex oral language skills, like storytelling and exposition, and their experiences of linguistic racism and discrimination within classroom settings.

Dr. Ioulia Kovelman          Language and Literacy Lab

Ioulia Kovelman studies the Bilingual Brain and how children learn to speak and to read in more than one language.  Dr. Kovelman’s current projects focus on cross-linguistic patterns in bilingual development, such as Spanish-English and Chinese-English speaking children, using functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) brain imaging. Her research extends to include individuals who speak multiple dialects of the same language, as well as children with reading and language learning impairments such as dyslexia, language impairments, and hearing deficits.  

Dr. Felix Warneken          Social Minds Lab

Felix Warneken studies the origins of human social behavior, with a focus on the development and evolution of cooperation and morality. He conducts developmental and cross-cultural studies with children, as well as comparative studies with nonhuman primates. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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Graduate Students & Postdoctoral Fellows

Lester Mejia Gomez– Conceptual Development Lab

Lester is a graduate student in the Developmental Psychology Ph.D. program at the University of Michigan and is a member of the Conceptual Development Lab. Before coming to UM, he received his B.S. in Psychology and Sociology at Wingate University in 2022. Lester is broadly interested in studying how children learn social concepts and categories and how that knowledge affects their reasoning and attitudes about others. Currently, he is working on a project investigating how the reason people immigrate influences children and adults’ moral evaluations of immigration response policies, and whether and how they would maintain or change immigration systems.

Ella Simmons– Conceptual Development Lab

Ella received her B.A. in Psychology from UC Berkeley in 2019. She is now a graduate student in Developmental Psychology interested in examining how children learn about the world around them, and how they organize the information they uncover. Her current research projects focus on the ways that children interpret generic pronouns (e.g., You can’t always get what you want) and generic nouns (e.g., Boys don’t cry), and how exposure to this language impacts children’s cognition and development.

Kayley Dotson– Social Minds Lab

Kayley is a first-year graduate student in developmental psychology at the University of Michigan. She received her bachelor’s degree at Duke University where she double-majored in Psychology & French Studies. During undergrad, she did research on joint attention, prosocial behavior, and norms in a developmental psychology lab (PI: Dr. Mike Tomasello). She then worked for two years as a lab manager for the Tomasello Lab, where she continued work on social bonding and prosocial behavior. Kayley is primarily interested in young children’s intentions and motivations in cooperation and prosocial behavior.

Kasia Myslinska-Szarek– Social Minds Lab

Kasia is a post-doc in the Social Minds Lab at the University of Michigan. She received her PhD at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Poland. She studies children’s moral development with a focus on the factors that shape children’s moral cognition and judgement.

Isabel Hernandez- Language and Literacy Lab

Isabel is the lab manger for the Language and Literacy lab. She received her bachelor’s degree from Universidad de las Americas-Puebla UDLAP (Puebla, México). She is interested in understanding cognitive, language processing, and brain development, especially in bilingual kids. Bilingual Spanish-English.

Kaili Ebert– Social Minds Lab

Before coming to Ann Arbor, Kaili received a BS in Brain and Cognitive Sciences and a BA in Psychology from the University of Rochester. There she worked in the Social Cognitive Development Lab and the Social Stress Lab where she explored how children reason about their social world and how social stress impacts daily functioning. She is interested in learning more about the ways in which children reason about social inequities and how families discuss it.