Amy Learmonth was the ISDP Program Director from 2018 through the 2020 Virtual Meeting. She was also serving as President of the Eastern Psychological Association in 2020 and therefore was involved in two Virtual Meetings, the EPA taking place not long after the COVID-19 lockdowns started.
She is a developmental psychologist and a professor of psychology at William Paterson University. She earned an AB in psychology from Bryn Mawr College and a Ph.D. from Temple University. Dr. Learmonth’s research interests are rooted in questions about the nature and mechanisms of imitation, memory, and spatial development through the preschool years. She has spent most of her career studying the development of cognition in typically developing children but has recently begun to explore imitation in children with autism. She also runs a large undergraduate lab and sponsors 8-12 honors theses per year as the director of the cognitive science honors program at William Paterson. She has been a member of ISDP since 2001 when she became a post-doc in Carolyn Rovee-Colliers lab at Rutgers University. She has served on the ISDP board and frequently presents posters at the conference.
Julie Campbell has been a member of ISDP for 14 years. As a student, she served ISDP as the Student Representative for two years. She was the Vice-ISDP Conference Coordinator in 2019 and took over as Conference Coordinator ISDP 2020 which pivoted to a fully virtual meeting. She has two more years as ISDP Conference Coordinator and is also currently serving on the Publications Committee for ISDP.
Julie received her Ph.D. under the tutelage of Dr. George Michel at the University of North Carolina Greensboro in 2015, and completed a pre-doctoral fellowship at the Center for Developmental Science at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2014. In 2015-2016, she served as the assistant to the editor for Developmental Psychobiology, working closely with the editor and authors during the manuscript review process.
Julie is an Assistant Professor in the developmental and quantitative areas of the psychology department at Illinois State University. She teaches courses in infant, child, and adolescent development, as well as experimental research methods. Her research addresses developmental issues in hemispheric specialization, lateralization, handedness, motor development, and quantitative methods. She is interested in applying a developmental psychobiological approach to the investigation of these topics, and is especially concerned with how the development of the lateralization of functions relate to other simultaneously developing systems. Within the broad topic of lateralization, she has focused on unimanual and bimanual hand use, role-differentiated bimanual manipulation, tool use, construction, language, and embodied cognition. Additionally, she is particularly interested in applying new quantitative methodologies to developmental studies.