Ronald Dahl on The Adolescence Window

In this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, Tom Vander Ark sits down with Dr. Ronald Dahl, a distinguished pediatrician and developmental scientist from UC Berkeley, to explore the transformative potential of adolescence. Together, they discuss why adolescence is not just a period of vulnerability but also a dynamic window of opportunity for learning, growth, and authentic contribution. Dr. Dahl highlights the importance of fostering agency, mattering, and experiential learning environments that allow young people to feel valued and empowered. From the neuroscience of brain plasticity to the actionable steps educators and leaders can take to create supportive systems, this conversation dives deep into how we can rethink adolescent development and learning. Tune in for insights on building authentic connections, navigating challenges, and creating spaces where young people can thrive and make meaningful contributions.

Outline

• (00:00) The Science of Adolescent Development
• (13:19) The Importance of Mattering and Contribution
• (19:48) Agency, Autonomy, and the Adolescent Experience
• (26:02) Technology, Learning, and Agency in Youth
• (39:31) Wisdom, Policy, and Closing Reflections

The Science of Adolescent Development

Tom Vander Ark: Well, early childhood has long been recognized as a critical period of intense brain plasticity. Ronald Dahl’s work has firmly established early adolescence as a second important dynamic window of opportunity for positive development. You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast. I’m Tom Vander Ark, and today we’re speaking with Dr. Ronald Dahl. He is a pediatrician, developmental scientist, and a distinguished professor at UC Berkeley. Ron, it’s really good to have you here.

Ron Dahl: It’s good to be here.

Tom Vander Ark: Ron, it feels like in the last 10 years you’ve helped America come to see adolescence as a great opportunity rather than a problem to be solved. How would you describe the way that our understanding of adolescent development has changed over the last 10 or 15 years, if that’s a better window?

Ron Dahl: Yeah, thank you. It’s such an important framework for everything we’re going to talk about, and that’s this balancing of the older view that funded so much research and interest in adolescence as this period of vulnerability, risks, and negative spirals. Those are all real and important and brought a lot of attention to the science. But we, as a field—particularly in the applied areas, like how does this inform what we really want to do to support young people—have flipped to the complementary frame. Everything that underpins the rapid change and cascading influences to the dark side, the negative, has a mirror image. This is a window of opportunity for learning and development in positive ways.

That’s been less studied because it didn’t always have funding from the people trying to understand broken systems to fix them. It’s been an inspiring journey. Even though you identified me as contributing to this, it’s all about the teams. The things I think I’ve done are convening the right groups of people to converge from different areas of research around this and its importance in terms of not just translating but actionable insights.

As we understand this, not as a brain that’s not formed or is not equal to an adult brain, but rather a brain that’s very sensitive to certain kinds of learning that, yes, creates risks but also creates these opportunities for deeper, more instantiated learning. It’s a different kind of plasticity. It’s a time when these different neural systems in the brain are connecting and interacting with each other in new ways—connecting strong feelings with ideas, connecting passions to goals, feeling inspired and expanded by contributing in valued ways. These make sense. There’s old wisdom about these, and I think the scientific underpinnings have a lot of implications for education settings and community settings trying to support young people.

Tom Vander Ark: Ron, I think I met Dr. Pamela Cantor 12 years ago, and she was the first one that really turned me on to this important period of neuroplasticity and the opportunities that came with it. We really appreciate your leadership over the last 15 years on this front. Let’s talk more specifically about how puberty sort of reorients the adolescent brain and what kind of changes that leads to.

Ron Dahl: I like to focus on puberty, and I think it’s an area where we need to transcend this “ugh” part, as if it’s about the biology and hormones. In fact, the key aspects of puberty are, first of all, happening earlier than people sometimes recognize. Some of these changes are beginning at 9, 10, or 11 years of age. So when we say adolescence and puberty, we’re not just talking about mid to late teens.

The second thing is, yes, there are all these dramatic changes in the body as we’re becoming physically mature, and those have effects on young people and how other people treat them. There are also changes in the neural systems that are supporting learning and development. The brain is tuned into social evaluation, and that has costs. None of us like to be embarrassed, humiliated, put down, or disrespected, but the intensity of those feelings calibrates at a higher level as puberty kicks in. Similarly, in this sort of yin and yang of vulnerabilities and opportunities, the thrill of being taken seriously, of hearing an authentic voice saying, “Wow, you did that,” feeling admired, and earning prestige and respect is more thrilling.

These are feedback signals. Young people are tuned to find ways to contribute that are authentically valued. I want to underscore the authentic. It’s not just about saying the right words. Anyone who’s spent a lot of time with young people knows the difference between saying the right words and having it land with the right feelings. One eye movement or tone of voice off, that makes it sound like you’re trying to compliment them so they work harder on what you think they should do, or that you’re slightly condescending, is counterproductive. The sensitivity to authentic feelings is so important at the action level. The best teachers, principals, coaches, and mentors know this, whether they articulate it that way or not. You can’t fake it. We’re terrible actors. They have such good detectors, and so it’s got to be authentic. We can’t pretend to admire the things we want to underscore or uplift. We have to really recognize and send authentic feelings from us to them that land authentically.

I use the word hunger or appetite because it has a biological basis. It’s not just wanting it; it’s not just reflecting in your mind, “Oh, I’d like to be admired.” It’s a feeling. It’s a deep feeling, like being thirsty, hungry, or lonely. These are deep, competitively based wanting systems or incentive systems. It’s not about the particular neural system; it’s about the way it influences behavior and learning.

Turning up the dial of wanting social value can lead to more risk-taking and reckless behavior—showing off, trying to find ways to earn respect. It so often drives positive risk-taking: raising your hand in class, asking someone on a date, competing for the lead in a play. It’s social risk-taking that creates natural thrills in ways that are not dangerous or life-threatening. It’s part of experiential learning.

This is again a bit of a tangent, yet it’s intertwined with what you asked. The proclivities that go up when young people are trying to gain social value require trial-and-error learning. That’s what experiential learning is. The most striking feedback we get is when we make a mistake—that’s when the deepest learning occurs. And who wants to make a mistake, especially in a social setting in middle school, when people are evaluating you? Yet, if we don’t make mistakes, if we don’t take some risks, we don’t get those feedback loops going the way they need to go.

As we’ll probably get to later, if we only interact with a bot that compliments us and tells us what we want to hear constantly, we’re not going to get a lot of feedback in the ways we really need for formative learning.

Tom Vander Ark: Ron, I think your work helped us understand the importance of mattering. You’ve been talking about that, but say a few more words. What is it to seek to matter?

Ron Dahl: Over the last couple of years, I—and by “I,” I mean we, a group of us—have increasingly focused on mattering. We struggle not just with what term or terminology to use but with articulating constructs that we can define and measure scientifically, while also resonating with common experience.

Mattering is a wonderful term for understanding what is very motivating in young people. Some of the work, including in adults, recognizes that mattering has two components. One is feeling appreciated. We all want to be appreciated—having people admire us, look up to us, or appreciate the value of what we’re bringing. Feeling appreciated is a basic human desire.

The second factor is that we want to be appreciated for what we do, for our actions. If you take someone in a complex work setting and they get a review where people say, “Oh yeah, you’re great. We really like you, we really value you,” but they don’t name a single thing that person actually did, how does it feel? It’s the same for young people. Mattering involves not only being appreciated and valued but also tying that appreciation to actions. If what you do doesn’t get a response, why keep trying? Why keep putting in more effort?

When young people look at the world and it feels confusing, terrifying, or as if it’s being destroyed by the previous generation, and what they try to do doesn’t seem to get any response, it feels like their actions don’t matter. This comes back to an earlier point: it’s not the words that I think in my head—”Well, my actions didn’t really do anything.” It’s the feeling. It’s an appraisal. The brain processes this not through words but feelings. If you can’t get those feelings that your actions matter at all, that’s got to cost something.

The other thing you can do is stir things up. At least you’re getting some reaction. It feels like you’re doing something. That part of us that wants agency—that wants to feel like we can do things—goes up in adolescence. That points to one of the most important opportunity frames: if young people can find ways to get feedback that their actions matter by doing things that matter to other people, by contributing, by being creative, that is a positive feedback loop. They’re feeling expanded, enlarged, and appreciated by doing things for others—not because they’re told to do it, not because they’re checking some box or filling out their volunteer hours, but because they’re getting authentic feelings where somebody says, “Wow, you came up with that idea.”

If they have a group of people that band together to do something that really makes a difference for their community, school, or whatever authentically feels worthy, those feedback loops are particularly important in early adolescence. It’s as if the brain has evolved to want those feedback loops, particularly finding ways to contribute to your group—not just to your family, which is really important, but contributing in larger ways. Creating opportunities for authentic contribution that’s authentically valued is

The Importance of Mattering and Contribution

Ron Dahl: the way to matter—by doing things that matter to others.

Tom Vander Ark: I want to give a big shoutout to Paul LeBlanc. He discovered your work and Elliot’s work on mattering, and he wrote two pandemic books about their application to higher ed. This notion of mattering is not just for early adolescents; it’s for older adolescents and even adult learners. Belonging and mattering are hugely motivating.

Closely related to that, Ron, I had a pre-pandemic hunch that what you said earlier—the ability to contribute and to have your contribution authentically valued—is hugely motivating. I wrote a book called Difference Making about schools alive with a sense of possibility, where young people are invited into value creation, into projects connected to their community, and they’re invited to experience contribution—what it feels like to make a difference for another person, family, or community. We call that experiencing success in what’s next. But I wish I had read all of your work before writing that book because I think you’ve authored a real strong academic basis for this idea. It sounds like you agree that being invited into contribution, particularly at the adolescent phase, can be really motivating and part of mattering. Is that right?

Ron Dahl: Yes, Tom. Your phrase “making a difference” and its relationship to contribution is really key. I like that phrase so much because it resonates with the idea of an action that has an outcome. Making a difference means having an effect on a system or other people, and we hope that’s in a pro-social, helpful, or contributory way.

Creating opportunities not only for young people to make a difference but also to have that difference be recognized and to have these authentic feedback loops—where others are recognizing how they’re making a difference in ways that can keep growing—is very much a growth model. These are really important.

The other thing that goes hand in glove—and it starts out sounding a bit different, but I think it’s very closely related in terms of how these learning systems are shaped by experience—is that one of the things young people are naturally navigating in this phase of life is that the ways to gain power and influence involve both cooperation and competition. It’s why sports are so interesting, right? Because so many sports are competitive. They tap into the part of us that likes competition at some level.

But if you’re part of a team, and if being effective requires cooperating with other people, this is probably part of our species-level development. Cooperation becomes critical as we hit this next phase of life and development. As we move from a juvenile period—where, yes, we have friends—suddenly the stakes go up. We’re developing a reputation as individuals in a new way. We’re developing a capacity to contribute in new ways, and we’re motivated to gain value by giving value. Trying to do that alone has a lot of limitations. Being cooperative and developing pro-social skills is key, and yet there’s inherently a competitive nature that stirs itself in that.

Without getting philosophical, I think that from a learning perspective, it is trial-and-error learning. Even with our close friends, we compete with them at some level, right? Some of the most fun competition is with the people we’re close to. This experiential learning—not only about how we contribute, how we matter, and how we make a difference, but also about being nimble between learning how to compete and cooperate—is key.

If you’re in a zero-sum game situation—let’s say you’re in an academic system where only the top 3% of performers make it and everyone else feels like a loser—that is not conducive to what we’re talking about. If there are 20 different niches for contributing in sports, clubs, technology, creativity, drama, or being the facilitator for people getting along, then you get a great dynamic. You compete, you cooperate. If it gets appraised as a zero-sum game of just winners and losers, there are a lot of losers at a key formative period of their life.

Tom Vander Ark: Yeah, Ron, those comments made me think about performing arts experiences. I’ve come to believe every student should have a couple of successful performing arts experiences. That can include front of the house, back of the house, but being part of a team on a short timeline, doing something very challenging for a public audience, and then feeling the success of being on that learning journey—both as an individual and as part of a team—feels like such a valuable thing. It’s one of those three or four things we remember 20 years later about our school experience.

Ron Dahl: Absolutely. I’m so glad you raised that because I went to the sports example first, and yet I think there are many, many ways to evoke or support the same kinds of dynamics. I was very inspired by interviewing a young man who had an incredibly difficult childhood in the foster care system—multiple placements, one of those young people who had the odds stacked against him. He became such a successful young adult and has really been a force in the movement for reform of the foster care system for adolescents.

What he talked about was his experience when he was 11 or 12, being in a theater group where unusual people were welcomed in. It was just, “Of course, you’re part of our group.” As he started to get peer acceptance in that group and was able to express himself, take more risks, and get some positive feedback loops, that got him on a different trajectory. It was fun. You work at doing it well when you’re trying to do a performance because you have an audience. It’s great experiential practice.

Being able to connect cooperatively as well as being challenged to perform while having fun—I think these are so important. Of course, as budget cuts and priorities for scoring on exams competitively get pushed too high on the priority list, some of these really crucial experiential learning experiences get thinned out.

Tom Vander Ark: Ron, you mentioned the word agency, and I’ve joined the agency bandwagon this year. One of the triggers was Andrej Karpathy, a leading AI researcher, who tweeted in February: “Agency > intelligence.” He went on to explain that we’d reached this threshold where your self-knowledge and ability to thoughtfully act on the world—to make good judgments about when, where, and how to act—had suddenly become more important than the stuff you know.

Charles Fadel, a scholar of learning outcomes, said agency is one of these key drivers. He packs it in with identity and purpose and says these are some new things that have to be education priorities. Reid Hoffman wrote a book called Super Agency and said we’re invited into a new sense of agency as amplified human beings. Are you on Team Agency? What is it? Is it important to you?

Ron Dahl: Yeah, I love the description you just gave. You captured so many really important and nuanced sets of ideas in that space. I’ll say three things aligned very closely with what you said. In the last few years, I’ve switched to using the term “agency” much more.

One part of that is that we had a tendency in developmental psychology to talk about autonomy, especially as we moved to adolescence. My colleague Andrew Fuligni pointed out that it’s not really autonomy because young people want to be with their friends. They want to engage in competition. They’re not seeking autonomy; they’re seeking autonomy from people trying to control them. They’re seeking autonomy from authority, parents, and people trying to tell them what to do or putting them down.

Tom Vander Ark: That sounds more like agency.

Ron Dahl: Exactly. You stepped ahead of me. That is what it is. It’s not autonomy; it’s agency. It’s that “I am doing things that matter. I am doing things that make a difference.” It’s not just taking in those words and remembering them. It’s having that appraisal that you act, lean in, take chances, take risks, and get feedback. That’s where the functional learning is occurring probabilistic. It’s not just about whether it works or doesn’t work; you’ve got to do it multiple times to recognize that this strategy in this situation works more frequently. And so I have an impulse to do that.

Tom Vander Ark: Let’s do one more drill down on agency. Describe two or three agentic experiences that you would want young people to have in middle school. What promotes agency?

Ron Dahl: One of the things about promoting agency is certainly creating choice options. It’s not only allowing young people to choose what they want to do or choose from a menu of what they want to do but also how they want to do it, how they want to persist, and how they want to extend that in creative ways. Really allowing them to experience the reward of trying things, stretching, and moving in different directions than what was planned—and learning something very different from where they started out—is key. Allowing that to get the positive feedback loop and saying, “Wow, that wasn’t what I thought or what the teacher thought or someone else in the team thought, but it worked,” is so important.

The third part is that this is not simply about action. These are embodied cognition processes, so allowing people to move is critical. I remember we had an education meeting once with a very global setting, and there were some Tibetan Buddhist education scholars. They studied for thousands of years how to educate young people, and they were baffled by why Western approaches had people sitting still in chairs. It was just totally confusing to them. They would act out their arguments. They had physical correlates to how they thought out loud. I grew up with Italian grandparents—I can’t talk without using my hands because it’s internalized that that’s part of thinking.

So why do we expect kids, at this exciting time when they’re experimenting with their agency and actions, to sit still? Or expect them to be organized to make behavioral control a little easier for the people managing them? Allowing more dynamic interactions, the way you would in a theater group or on a sports field, is essential. Physical action is a part of agency.

Agency, Autonomy, and the Adolescent Experience

Tom Vander Ark: Ron, I’m going to do a quick speed round and ask you about eight or nine things. I want your take—a quick, kind of hot take—on their impact on youth development. Good, bad, promising, damaging. Let’s start out with an easy one: social media.

Ron Dahl: Social media is complicated. I think the evidence is that it’s probably not as bad as people think, but things that displace human-to-human interaction or displace creativity and agency are problematic. Social media often does that, but it doesn’t have to—just like AI doesn’t have to. I think it’s more about how young people are using technology to interact, create, and contribute versus passively taking in information and monetizing their eyeball time.

Tom Vander Ark: Gaming, and more specifically, game-based learning?

Ron Dahl: Again, I think the opportunities for game-based learning to be really powerful and positive are enormous. But it can just as easily be incentivized for profits. So I think it’s more about how it’s used than whether it’s globally good or bad.

Tom Vander Ark: What about simulations, and particularly career simulations?

Ron Dahl: I think if they are part of a design for having the kinds of learning experiences that young people are trying to have—where they have agency and choice—rather than just for entertainment value or novelty, they can be positive.

Tom Vander Ark: During the pandemic, we gave every kid a dose of tutoring, and now AI tutoring is supposed to be all the rage. Are you optimistic or pessimistic about academic AI tutoring?

Ron Dahl: This is an enormously important set of questions—what’s happening with AI and AI-related technologies. I think there are two ways to look at it. One is in the mentoring and relational space, and the second is as a way to get helpful information.

In each of these, the conceptual issue is: if AI shortens the learning journey, it’s a problem. If it’s just about getting answers without having the experiences of how you got the answer, that’s an issue. AI can deepen and enrich the learning journey, but it can also shortcut it. Similarly, if young people are rehearsing how to have in-real-life interactions—if it’s a way to practice an awkward social situation or scaffold what to say—it can be positive. But if it’s a frictionless way to get positive feedback that allows them to avoid the kind of high-agency learning they need in order to do that cooperation-competition interaction, it’s going to be really problematic.

This places a premium on how to promote human-to-human interaction and the development of social and emotional skills—the way a sport or theater would do—and not have AI or technology displace those but scaffold them.

Tom Vander Ark: What about the continuum of an AI friend, relational AI, to AI counseling, all the way to AI therapy and AI therapeutics? Are you positive on any of that?

Ron Dahl: I’m highly skeptical. The problem with commercial AI is that it’s ultimately for profit. The ability to use some of those tools in positive ways could be really exciting, but commercial AI on its own is going to have to return investors a profit. Setting aside the political part of this—and it’s not to make anyone out to be evil—designing some of these tools in a way that can be helpful is certainly possible, certainly there. There’s opportunity, and we probably shouldn’t dichotomize what’s human intelligence and what’s artificial intelligence (AI). Instead, we should ask, “What is collaborative intelligence that can help us with human-to-human interaction?” Designing ways to use these tools and learning how to use these tools is critical.

At least with the large language models, they are not doing human social information sending and receiving. They don’t get feelings. They don’t have feelings. They sequence words. We started out this conversation saying it’s not about saying the right words—it’s about landing the right feelings. It’s about repairing when you hurt someone’s feelings and recognizing that’s really important. Learning the trial-and-error process of how to do anything in life collaboratively—team-based and competition-based—requires those skills.

If young people primarily stay in the safe space of interacting with a counselor, mentor, or tutor that is AI-based—even if it’s programmed to challenge them once in a while—they’re not picking up on microexpressions, tone of voice, facial expressions, posture, or the action-agency-based kinds of interactions with humans.

Tom Vander Ark: For older adolescents, what about work and work-based learning experiences?

Ron Dahl: I think experiential learning is so central and important. Yes, there can be jobs that are really constraining, but in general, we learn by doing. We learn through our actions. We learn through navigating uncertain, challenging situations and feeling some mastery and reward from putting in the effort and figuring out—by making some mistakes—how to do that.

Positive work environments are a great place for this. They can have intellectual challenges, require developing expertise in certain areas, and provide opportunities for growth. Having experiential learning is so valuable. That’s true in higher education as well. We’re seeing a crisis in higher education where young people don’t want to sit in lectures, take in information, and be tested. They want to be doing things that change the world. They want to contribute. They want to have an impact.

Tom Vander Ark: I appreciate that. I do think everybody ought to have at least one really bad job just to learn the value of hard work.

Ron Dahl: I always talk about my bad jobs. I was fortunate to have some economic challenges growing up. I didn’t have any choice.

Tom Vander Ark: I learned the value of hard work and decided I didn’t want to do that forever.

Ron Dahl: Yeah, and some of the jobs that I thought were bad turned out to be really good, and vice versa. I’m definitely an advocate for work experiences. Trying to just protect young people so they can focus solely on school can be honorable, but if we undermine some of the life experiences that are complementary to education, I think that’s a mistake. I couldn’t agree more.

Tom Vander Ark: All right, we already talked about the arts and expression and agreed that’s super important. What about civic participation and community-connected projects? Are those valuable developmentally?

Ron Dahl: Yes, these are compelling issues. Whether we frame it in terms of our democracy, community engagement, or something else, helping young people feel like their actions can contribute—and that they have both an opportunity and a responsibility to do so—is critical. Feeling that your actions and efforts can contribute to something larger than yourself or your immediate sphere is essential.

Doing that early and often seems pretty fundamental to our society.

Technology, Learning, and Agency in Youth

Tom Vander Ark: I suspect it contributes to both a valued sense of self and healthy patriotism—unlike the civics and patriot education heading our direction from the White House. Last one: mindfulness. We see more and more schools offering, formally or informally, a little bit of mindfulness experiences. Is that positive?

Ron Dahl: I think it can be. Sometimes simple versions of mindfulness seem kind of boring to young people, but there are ways to convey mindfulness-like awareness and attunement that can be more active. The best versions of mindfulness can be wonderful for developing skills.

Tom Vander Ark: Let’s close with a couple of words of advice, Ron. When you think about teacher-leaders and education leaders in the middle of their school year, what’s one or two things they could pay attention to next week that would begin to make a difference?

Ron Dahl: I think focusing on authentic feelings is key. At the policy level, it’s easy to go through the motions, be slightly inauthentic, or just do what’s required. But taking that extra time to make a real connection—to listen, not just to show you’re listening, but to truly hear someone—is so important.

Young people need to feel recognized, heard, and noticed when they put in effort. The difference between almost doing that and really landing it is like night and day.

Tom Vander Ark: I appreciate that. What about education policy leaders, either local or state? What should they be paying attention to?

Ron Dahl: I don’t know if I can unpack this quickly, but I would say, especially when you think about complex systems and feedback loops, we need faster feedback loops about what’s working and what’s not working. We also need trusted conveyors of those feedback loops—individuals in the system who have enough wisdom and experience to think critically.

We need to try new things, challenge the status quo, and create feedback loops so we can make adjustments in reasonable periods of time.

Wisdom, Policy, and Closing Reflections

Tom Vander Ark: I really love that. I can’t resist this, Ron. I asked ChatGPT what advice you would give, and I really love these answers. I want to share them. It says the first thing Ron would recommend is redefining interventions. Interventions should focus less on stopping bad behavior and more on providing compelling alternatives that satisfy and amplify the need for social value, exploration, and belonging.

Ron Dahl: Wow.

Tom Vander Ark: Number two: structuring environments. Schools, youth organizations, and communities must create environments that offer adolescents the opportunity for authentic contribution and valued roles.

Ron Dahl: Oh my God. I’m getting chills because it’s that point. We say artificial intelligence versus human intelligence, but collaborative intelligence—the ability to capture ideas and pick the right words to capture complex ideas—can be amazing. It’s very humbling to see.

Tom Vander Ark: I think it’s an amazing summary of your life’s work, Ron. I super appreciate it. It’s a good summary. Ron, thank you so much for your time and for your contributions to the field of youth development. It’s been so important for so many of us working in this space, and we just appreciate the humble, thoughtful, collaborative approach you’ve taken over the last 20 years. The way your wisdom shows up in so many different channels is remarkable. Thank you for your work and for the wise way you’ve shared your contributions.

Ron Dahl: Thank you so much, Tom. This has been a great conversation. Sending and receiving signals in authentic ways—I have felt very fulfilled by what’s been happening as we discuss, even over the technology. A lot of gratitude. Thank you so much.

Tom Vander Ark: Thanks to our producer, Mason Pashia, who was hanging out with Ron this summer and made this conversation possible, and to the whole Getting Smart team. Until next week, keep learning, keep leading, and keep innovating for mattering. See you next week.

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Guest Bio

Ronald Dahl

Ronald E. Dahl is the Director of the Institute of Human Development at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also serves as a Professor in the School of Public Health and the Joint Medical Program and runs the Adolescent Research Collaborative. He is the Founding Director of the  Center for the Developing Adolescent, where he provides the strategic vision for the Center’s research agenda. He is a pediatrician and developmental scientist with long-standing research interests in the development of sleep/arousal regulation, affect regulation and the development of behavioral and emotional disorders in children and adolescents. His current work focuses on adolescence as a developmental period with unique opportunities for early intervention in relation to a wide range of behavioral and emotional health problems. His research is interdisciplinary and bridges between basic developmental research (emphasizing social and affective neuroscience) and the translation of this work into clinical and social policy relevance. He has published extensively on child and adolescent development, sleep disorders, behavioral/emotional health in children, adolescent brain development and on the policy implications of this work. He has been elected as a Fellow of several organizations including: Association for Psychological Science, American Academy of Pediatrics, New York Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Sleep Medicine. He is a Founding Editor of the journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience and is a Past President of the Society for Research in Child Development.

Links

• LinkedIn
• UC Berkeley