Next week was to be the week of the Fourth Annual Gesell Lectures on Lifespan Development. This annual event is cosponsored by the Yale Child Study Center, Yale Center for Clinical Investigation, the YSM Department of Pediatrics, and Yale’s Department of Psychology, and others, and brings in a distinguished scholar as the Gesell Lecture Visiting Professor. The Gesell Lectureship was established to bring to Yale each year a leading thinker whose work contributes to our understanding of human development and its relationship to the behavioral and social development of multiple species. Typically, the Visiting Professor spends nearly a week at Yale, giving three different lectures across the week to the public, and also meeting in small groups with faculty, trainees, and students to provide input, insight, and feedback on their research, as well as to discuss potential research collaborations. The Visiting Professor traditionally is world-renowned in their field, and their research pertains to developmental processes beginning in childhood that influence brain and behavioral development across the lifespan.
The Gesell Lectures were launched in 2017, with Dr. Stephen J. Suomi as the first Gesell Lecture Visiting Professor, followed by Dr. Megan Gunnar in 2018 and the late Dr. Bruce McEwen in 2019. Next week should have seen us welcoming Dr. Nathan Fox as the Fourth Gesell Lecture Visiting Professor.
But, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Fox’s visit will be rescheduled for a future date. Next week, however, we will highlight Dr. Fox and his groundbreaking research into the biological bases of social and emotional behavior in infants and children with a series of three articles that will preserve the spirit of the three lectures he would have given. We’ll culminate the week with a video interview with Dr. Fox, in which he will discuss his research in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Check back Monday, April 27, for the first of the three-part series of articles describing Dr. Fox’s research.
Now available: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of the series, and a video interview with Dr. Fox about COVID-19.