ABOUT SSEA
Steering Committee
Jeffrey J. Arnett, Chair
Arnett is a Research Professor in the Department of Psychology at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. During 2005 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is the editor of the Journal of Adolescent Research and of two encyclopedias published in 2007, the International Encyclopedia of Adolescence (Routledge, two volumes) and the Encyclopedia of Children, Adolescents, and the Media (Sage, two volumes). Dr. Arnett is the originator of the theory of emerging adulthood and the author of numerous articles on emerging adulthood, as well as the textbook Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood: A Cultural Approach (2004, Prentice Hall). His book Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties, was published in 2004 by Oxford University Press. He has also edited a book on emerging adulthood (with Jennifer Tanner), Emerging Adults in America: Coming of Age in the 21st Century, published in 2006 by APA Books. For more information, see www.jeffreyarnett.com.
Jennifer L. Tanner, Co-Chair
Dr. Tanner (Ph.D., Human Development and Family Studies, The Pennsylvania State University) focuses her work on the intersection of clinical and developmental issues in individuals aged 18 to 30, emerging adults. Currently a National Institute of Mental Health Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research (Rutgers University), she is focusing on policy analysis of recent state legislative actions aimed to reduce the rate of uninsured emerging adults. She serves as Co-Chair of the Society for the Study of Emerging Adults and co-edited a volume, Emerging Adults in America: Coming of Age in the 21st Century (2006; with Dr. Jeffrey Jensen Arnett), published by the American Psychological Association. In this volume, Dr. Tanner presented a theoretical overview of development from adolescence through adulthood from a life span developmental systems perspective. Previously a Research Assistant Professor at Simmons College in Boston, MA, Jennifer’s empirical research has detailed changes in prevalence rates of psychiatric disorders in a community population from ages 21 to 30 using data from the Simmons Longitudinal Study. Drawing on data from the same study, Dr. Tanner is collaborating to identify common patterns of mental health problems from adolescence through age 30. JenniferLTanner.com
Carrie Douglass
Professor and Chair, World Languages, Literature and Cultures Department, Mary Baldwin College
I spent my youth as an “army brat,” beginning school in Japan and finishing high school in Germany, before I did my undergraduate work at the University of Nebraska. After graduating in 1970 I went to Israel to do archaeology. From Israel I went to Spain, where I lived for eight years (in Barcelona), teaching English as a Second Language and doing more archaeology in England and Spain. Later I returned to the University of Virginia to get a PhD in anthropology (1988) and begin my professional academic life. My early work was on Spain and national identity, using the vehicles of the bullfight and fiestas to talk about state and regional identities there (Bulls, Bullfighting and National Identities, University of Arizona Press, 1997). Later, the precipitous fall of the birthrate in Spain throughout the 1990s turned my research to the low fertility there and in the rest of Europe (Barren States: The Population ‘Implosion’ in Europe, Berg, 2005, awarded Most Noted Recent Edited Collection Book Prize, by the Council on Anthropology and Reproduction, 2006). I think the one-child family is changing family structure throughout the post-industrial world and is an important historic phenomenon in human history. Although I continue to be interested in issues of low fertility globally, at the present moment, on sabbatical from Mary Baldwin College, I am a Fellow at the International Center for Jefferson Studies near Charlottesville, Virginia, where I am working on a book on Thomas Jefferson and horses.
Nancy Galambos
Dr. Galambos is Professor of Psychology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Dr. Galambos is currently Assistant Editor for the Journal of Adolescence, has served on numerous editorial boards for journals in the field of adolescence, and was co-editor for 10 years of the Research Monographs in Adolescence series. She has conducted research on the antecedents and consequences of adolescent risk and health behavior, the importance of the family context in shaping adolescent behavior, and the nature and definition of psychosocial maturity in adolescence (http://www.ualberta.ca/~galambos/nancyweb.html). Most recently, as director of the Youth Transitions Lab at the University of Alberta (http://www.ualberta.ca/~youthlab/), Dr. Galambos has examined trajectories of depression, anger, and self-esteem during emerging adulthood, conducted daily and monthly diary studies of health and risk behaviors during the transition to university, observed barriers to and facilitators of psychosocial maturity in emerging adults with motor disabilities, and written on adolescence and emerging adulthood in Latin America.
Varda Mann-Feder
Mann-Feder is Associate Professor of Applied Human Sciences at Concordia University in Montreal Quebec. She is a Clinical Psychologist, and teaches adolescent development, counselling and youth work. For over 30 years, Varda has provided consultation to the English Child Welfare System in Quebec, where the focus of her input has been on the fomulation of developmentally appropriate intervention with youth in foster care and residential treatment. Since 1998, Varda's research activities have focused on the transition to adulthood for youth in placement, and in 2007, she served as editor for a special issue of New Directions in Youth Development entitled "Transition or eviction: Youth exiting care for independent living" (vol.113). Her current interest is in assisting practitioners to develop strategies for supporting marginalized youth in transition that reflect current findings on the nature of Emerging Adulthood.
D. Wayne Osgood
Dr. Osgood is a Professor in the Crime, Law and Justice Program of the Department of Sociology at Pennsylvania State University. He is a member of the MacArthur Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood , a fellow of the American Society of Criminology, and Associate Editor of the journal Criminology. He received his Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1977. His research focuses on the transition to adulthood for vulnerable populations and delinquency and other deviant behaviors of adolescence and early adulthood. He was lead editor of the MacArthur network sponsored volume On Their Own Without a Net: The Transition to Adulthood for Vulnerable Populations and contributed to their volume On the Frontier of Adulthood: Theory, Research, and Public Policy. Dr. Osgood has published substantive research on peers and delinquency, time use and deviance, criminal careers, the generality of deviance, and biology and crime, and he has written methodological articles concerning multi-level models for longitudinal research, scaling self-reported delinquency, limited and discrete dependent variables, and Poisson-based analysis of aggregate data. Dr. Osgood vita.
Inge Seiffge-Krenke
Seiffge-Krenke is a full professor of Psychology and has been the head of the Developmental Psychology Section at the Department of Psychology at the University of Mainz, Germany since 1997, after holding professorships in Developmental Psychology at several German universities. As a member of SRA (Society for Research in Adolescence since 1992 and a member of EARA (European Association for Research in Adolescence) since 1988, she was active on many international and European conferences since then. From May she will serve as President for EARA. She is in the editorial board of several international journals including Journal of Adolescence and Journal of Youth and Adolescence. Together with Leo Henry and Marion Kloep, she is one of the Series Editors for the Study in Adolescent Series of Psychology Press. Inge Seiffge-Krenke has published 20 books and 102 articles in German and international journals. In a longitudinal study starting 1991 and spanning 17 years, she was interested in the development of close relations, including parent-child relations, and romantic relations at the transition from adolescence to emerging adulthood. She is currently involved in a new project, together with Peter Noack, where they intend to investigate the developmental models helping to balance aims of partnerships and aims profession in emerging adults from a highly diverse background. In addition, she is heading an international project on stress and coping including more than 15.000 adolescents from over 20 countries. One of the most interesting findings of this latter project is the fearful future anticipations of older adolescents across all countries. Contact information: Inge Seiffge-Krenke (seiffge@uni-mainz.de), Department of Psychology, University Mainz, Staudinger Weg 9, 55099 Mainz, Germany
John Schulenberg
Schulenberg is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research and Center for Human Growth and Development, the University of Michigan. He has published widely on several topics concerning psychosocial development across adolescence and into early adulthood, focusing on how developmental transitions and tasks relate to health risks and adjustment difficulties over time. His current research is on the etiology of substance use and psychopathology, focusing on continuity, discontinuity, and co-morbidity across adolescence and adulthood. He is a co-PI of the NIDA funded national Monitoring the Future study concerning the epidemiology and etiology of substance use among the nation’s adolescents, college students, and young adults (http://www.monitoringthefuture.org/). Dr. Schulenberg has served on numerous advisory and review committees for the National Institutes of Health and the Society for Research on Adolescence. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association.
GRADUATE STUDENT REPRESENTATIVES
Jerel P. Calzo
Calzo, M.A., was born and raised in San Diego, CA. He holds Bachelor’s degrees in Psychology and English from UCLA. While at UCLA, Jerel served as a research assistant to Dr. Patricia Greenfield at the Children’s Digital Media Center, and as a project manager to Drs. Vickie Mays and Susan Cochran at the Black Community AIDS Research and Education Project and the UCLA Center for Research, Education, Training, and Strategic Communication on Minority Health Disparities. Jerel is currently a doctoral candidate in Developmental Psychology at the University of Michigan, where he works with Drs. L. Monique Ward and John Schulenberg. Jerel is also a participant in the Development, Psychopathology, and Mental Health Program, and a fellow of the LIFE Program. Jerel’s research employs both quantitative and qualitative methods to examine adolescent and emerging adult health and social development. His specific foci are developmental transitions, such as puberty and the transition out of high school, and the intersections of mental health, gender, sexual socialization, and sexual health. For his Master’s thesis, he focused on the connections between sexual socialization, intentions to lose virginity, and engagement in non-coital and coital sexual behavior among emerging adults. Ongoing projects focus on college students’ hookup experiences, the socialization of beliefs and attitudes about homosexuality, body image socialization during the pubertal shift, contributions of gender and sexual socialization to gender differences in psychopathology, and trajectories of sexual behavior and substance use throughout adolescence and emerging adulthood.
Andrea Dalton
Dalton (PhD student, Department of Psychology, University of Alberta) is studying sexual development from a lifespan perspective in adolescents and emerging adults under the supervision of Dr. Nancy Galambos. Andrea's research focuses on determining relations between sexual behavior and indicators of positive development. Results of her research on trajectories of sexual behavior in students making the transition to university were presented at the Second Conference on Emerging Adulthood (February, 2007). For her dissertation, Andrea intends to collect longitudinal data measuring personal, social, and emotional predictors of change in sexual behaviour among high school students making the transition to adulthood. Andrea recently contributed chapters to the two-volume International Encyclopedia of Adolescence (2006), and has presented her research at several national and international conferences. In her spare time, Andrea is a leader and activist with the University of Alberta's Graduate Students' Association.
Moin Syed
Syed is a doctoral candidate in developmental psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, working with Margarita Azmitia. He holds a BA in psychology and MA in developmental psychology, both from San Francisco State University. Moin’s research is broadly concerned with identity development in adolescence and emerging adulthood. Drawing from an interdisciplinary perspective, he is particularly interested in the development of multiple personal and social identities (e.g., ethnicity, social class, and gender) and how educational experiences, such as the transition to college, both afford and constrain identity pathways. Methodologically, he is a proponent of qualitative and mixed method research, and heavily favors a narrative approach to identity development as a means for capturing the cultural and contextual nature of the intersection of personal and social identities. However, he also embraces quantitative methodologies and currently serves as the primary quantitative analyst for an NIH-funded project concerned with increasing minority (i.e., ethnicity and gender) representation in science and engineering graduate programs. Moin has published his work in Developmental Psychology, Identity, and the Journal of Adolescence, and is the co-editor of a recent issue of New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development on interdisciplinary approaches to studying identity development. More information about his research can be found at http://people.ucsc.edu/~msyed.
Brian Willoughby
Willoughby is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota. Brian is originally from Wisconsin and received his bachelor's degree in Psychology from Brigham Young University with a minor in Marriage, Family and Human Development. Brian received his master's degree in Family Social Science from the University of Minnesota. Before attending graduate school, Brian worked as an autism therapist and as a mentor for at-risk adolescent boys. His major research interests including: premarital relationship development and formation, premarital predictors of marital success, marriage education and the interplay between attitudes and behavior. Brian has also studied risk-taking during emerging adulthood and is particularly interested in how behaviors, attitudes, and relationships during emerging adulthood influence later marital and family formation. Bran is currently involved in several research projects including a federally funded project investigating how mentors can help low-income unmarried parents improve their relationships and a multi-site project dedicated to exploring several avenues of emerging adulthood development. Recent publications have focused on marital education and the link between marital attitudes and emerging adulthood behavior. Brian currently lives in the Twin Cities with his wife and three children.