Child Study Center at the SRCD 2025 Biennial Meeting

The Society for Research in Child Development’s 2025 Biennial Meeting was held May 1-3 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In keeping with tradition, the Child Study Center hosted a reception on the first night of the conference, which was held at the Hilton Minneapolis. The reception, open to alumni, faculty, colleagues, and fellow students, was well attended and served as a great opportunity to catch up with old friends and to meet new ones.

Dawn P. Witherspoon, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Penn State and director of Parents And Children Together (PACT), a community-university partnership to enhance the lives of diverse youth and families, was an invited speaker for the Biennial event. Current developmental graduate student Tyiobi Maereg was also an invited speaker, as well as former graduate student Santiago Morales, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology and pediatrics at the University of Southern California. Many of the CSC’s current graduate students presented posters or papers during the conference.

2025 SRCD Biennial Awardees included Karen Bierman, who received the Distinguished Contributions to Public Policy & Practice in Child Development award. The award was given “for exceptional contributions to the design and evaluation of school-based and family-focused interventions that promote social-emotional competence and school success; for cutting-edge applications of developmental science and longitudinal methodologies to understand and optimize the long-term impact of early interventions; and, for translational efforts to disseminate research findings and increase school and community supports for vulnerable children and families.”

The CSC Penn State reception was generously co-sponsored by Penn State’s Social Science Research Institute, Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center, and the Department of Human Development and Family Studies.

Click here to view photos from SRCD 2025.