To help explore how developmental science can be more effective in improving the diverse human experience, the invited theme for 2025 focuses on using Developmental Science for the Public Good. Keynote speakers and invited symposia/panels will highlight research and teaching that meaningfully impacts diverse communities. One focus will be on translating research for real-world use, ensuring that findings reach families, educators, and policymakers in accessible ways. Because improving communities involves engaging with communities from the beginning, the theme will also highlight community-engaged scholarship across the globe, underscoring ethical obligations in research, participatory action research, and the importance of amplifying youth voices. Speakers will highlight innovative methods, including applied research and intervention science, and will emphasize diversifying our curricula to make developmental research more inclusive and accessible.
Date |
Event |
August 20, 2025 |
Early Conference Registration Deadline |
September 22, 2025 |
Regular Conference Registration Deadline |
October 23, 2025 |
Diversity Science Initiative Writing Workshop |
October 24-26, 2025 |
Conference |
Critical Pedagogies and Inclusive Evidence in Developmental Science: Locating Our 'Come from Place'
Developmental science as a field is itself at a formative period of development, reconciling its history with dominant perspectives that often represented narrow samples or phenomena, and pushes toward more pluralistic, critically engaged approaches that reflect the realities of diverse communities. This roundtable symposium explores how our “come from place”—including our social identities, family roles, culture, institutional positions, and community connections—shapes the ways we teach, research, and apply developmental science. By centering our positionalities, we model an approach to developmental science that is inclusive, transformative, and responsive to the complexities of human development across varied and multilayered contexts.
Through dialogue with one another and with the audience, the panelists—Drs. Mona Abo-Zena, Nicholas Hartlep, Matthew Kim, and Meenal Rana will identify challenges and possibilities for teaching developmental science critically and for expanding the field’s boundaries. A central focus will be strategies to broaden the evidence base by incorporating marginalized voices and global perspectives, while also examining how power, culture, and institutions define what counts as “valid” knowledge.
Organized by Drs. Meenal Rana and Deborah Johnson
Faciliated by Dr. Yoko Yamamoto
This roundtable symposium aligns with the conference theme by offering a generative space for scholars to strategize around sustaining research productivity and voice amidst the growing challenges faced by Diversity Science scholars. It emphasizes cross-group coalition-building, research continuity, and mutual empowerment—all central high quality science forto the public good science.
In an era of escalating challenges to equity-driven research, our strongest asset is one another and our common interestseach other. This roundtable convenes leading scholars to collaboratively strategize how the Diversity Science Initiative (DSI) and its broader interdisciplinary networks can sustain research productivity, coalition-building, and public impact. Together with audience participants, we will reflect on what it means to “circle the wagons” around shared values and scientific commitments, and to protect the spaces where our voices matter most. This session seeks to reclaim a collective sense of empowerment and recommitment to the public good through sustained collaboration, innovation, and advocacy.
Poster Session and Reception with Cash Bar
This presentation engages with and extends a biocultural, embodied framework of human development, emphasizing the dynamic coupling between individuals and their developmental niches. Drawing on insights from developmental biology and the extended evolutionary synthesis, development is reframed as active engagement within a space of possibility shaped by the entangled dynamics of biological processes, cultural practices, and structural conditions, and carried forward across generations. A study of infant motor development illustrates how developmental pathways reflect active exploration within nested constraints. Rather than treating variation as deviation from a norm, this perspective views it as revealing the constraint dynamics through which biology and culture become fundamentally integrated. The presentation concludes by considering how this framework can inform research, education, and applied work aimed at understanding and supporting the developmental conditions through which human potential takes shape.
Poster Session and Reception with Cash Bar
The conference hotel is the Hyatt Regency in downtown Lexington. It is an easy walk to many restaurants, bars, and attractions, as well as the university.
To make hotel reservations, follow the link:
https://www.hyatt.com/en-US/group-booking/LEXRL/G-UKRE
The Hyatt Regency offers conference attendees:
- Complimentary Shuttle to and from the Bluegrass Airport
- Complimentary Self-Parking for overnight guests
- Complimentary High-Speed Internet Access in all guestrooms & hotel meeting space
Never been to Lexington? Named one of the 5 Best Small Cities in the US, you will be excited to discover an inclusive, vibrant city known for bourbon, horses, and an eclectic food and arts scene. A Midwest-Southern hybrid, the city is home to University of Kentucky and Transylvania University, the oldest university west of the Allegheny Mountains, as well as one of the country's oldest continuously open LGBTQ+ gathering places in the US. There are many walking tours, bourbon samplings, and art museums to check out after the conference.
Regular period is available until Oct 20, 2025.
SSHD will provide a poster board that will accomodate a poster that is up to 46 inches wide and up to 45 inches high. Because of the space constraints, we recommend a square poster that is 45 inches X 45 inches.
Each author is responsible for the assembly and removal of their poster. SSHD will provide push pins on site to hang your poster on the poster board. Please remove your poster at the end of your session.
No A/V will be needed or provided.
Do your best to stand at your poster for the entirety of the meeting poster session. If you do need to leave your poster for any reason, ensure you include your contact information, so you can be contacted by meeting attendees who may read your poster while you are not there.
All session rooms will include one LCD projector, a screen, and a microphone. SSHD does not provide laptops; you will need to bring your own. Additional A/V equipment will not be available for use in meeting rooms.
To see the map of restaurants available in a walking distance.