Patricia Marks Greenfield

Developmental psychology expert with particular focus on the understanding of cultural learning, cognitive development, and the ontogenetic, neural, and phylogenetic foundations of language, whose research has opened up new empirical, methodological, and theoretical lines of investigation. Research ranges beyond developmental psychology, touching on anthropology, sociology, education and neuroscience. Early work in Senegal revealed that Piaget's description of cognitive development depended on Western schooling, not just chronological age. Subsequent studies addressed globalized social change and human development, apprenticeship learning, the relationship between informal and formal education, cultural barriers to the integration of immigrant children and families into the host society, and the development impact of communication technologies. Her recent theory of social change and human development published in Developmental Psychology (2009) is stimulating research around the world, including a new grant from the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation to study social change and adolescent development in Arab, Bedouin, and Ethiopian communities in Israel.