Professor of Psychology David S. Moore
Claremont, Calif. (April 15, 2016)—The National Science Foundation (NSF) has tapped Pitzer Professor of Psychology David S. Moore as the new Program Director for its Developmental and Learning Sciences Program. His one- to three-year appointment begins this July.
As the program director for NSF’s Developmental and Learning Sciences (DLS) Program, one of Moore’s many responsibilities will be to articulate a vision for the future of the discipline and allocate program resources to maintain a balance of support to meet the field’s needs and future development. The program director is guided by the goals of NSF’s Strategic Plan to transform the frontiers of science and engineering; stimulate innovation and address societal needs through research and education; and excel as a federal science agency.
David S. Moore is a developmental cognitive neuroscientist with expertise in infant cognition. He explored how human traits are caused by interactions between genes and the environment at every stage of development in his first book, The Dependent Gene: The Fallacy of “Nature vs. Nurture,” which was nominated for the Cognitive Development Society’s Best Authored Volume award. His most recent book, The Developing Genome: An Introduction to Behavioral Epigenetics, won the American Psychological Association’s 2016 Eleanor Maccoby Book Award in Developmental Psychology. Moore is also the founder and director of the Claremont Infant Study Center at Pitzer College, which examines how infants perceive and learn from the world around them. Moore earned his PhD and MA from Harvard University and his BA from Tufts University.
NSF’s Developmental and Learning Sciences Program supports research that addresses developmental processes within the domains of cognitive, social, emotional, and motor development in infants, children, adolescents, adults or non-human animals. The program also supports research investigating factors that affect developmental change, including family, peers, school, community, culture, media, physical, genetic and epigenetic influences.
