Isabella (Isa) Stallworthy, a PhD in developmental psychology student in the Institute of Child Development, received a James S. McDonnell Foundation 21st Century Postdoctoral Fellowship Award in Understanding Dynamic and Multi-scale Systems.

The award provides 2-3 years of flexible postdoctoral funding support and supports scholarship and research directed toward the discovery and refinement of theoretical and mathematical tools contributing to the continued development of the study of complex adaptive nonlinear systems.

This fellowship provides students in the final stages of their Ph.D. degree more autonomy in identifying and securing postdoctoral training opportunities and is designed for students who have already demonstrated maturity independence of thought and self-initiation. Stallworthy’s application is titled, “Leveraging Complexity Science to Investigate the Developmental Origins of Social Life,” and funding will support 2-3 years of postdoctoral training at the university of her choice.

Stallworthy’s postdoc goals are to learn new data collection skills and methodological techniques for studying the complex, nonlinear, and emergent processes that underlie social interactions in infancy in order to better support healthy child development. She hopes to investigate the dynamic origins of social interactions at multiple levels including (1) the interacting neural and behavioral processes that support infant-adult interactions in real time, (2) the functional role of dyadic synchrony and flexibility for infant development, and (3) developmental stability and change in multi-system social interaction dynamics across context and the first years of life.