Director's Welcome
Dear DevSci Community,
This marks our 7th year as a Northwestern Institute. During these start-up years, we have coalesced a robust university-wide transdisciplinary developmental sciences community. We did so by linking developmental science pockets and programs of excellence across departments and schools; launching a spectrum of training programs, building a strong extramural portfolio, and expanding the reach and impact of developmental science through building collaborations with university units and community settings serving children and families, with an especially unique partnership with Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital. We have exploded insular ideas about development as a niche area, through boundary spanning collaborations, new paradigms and enabling platforms for training, innovation and application: #development matters across the lifespan, health and disease conditions and a range of contexts. We have come a long way and our accomplishments should be savored.
On this extraordinary foundation, we are now poised to enact our vision for DevSci 2.0, taking our Institute from start-up to scale in the next five years. Through extensive conversations with many of you, Northwestern leaders from adjacent units, and our national advisory board, we have generated the strategic priorities that follow. These center on accelerating impact, increasing inclusive excellence and developmental health equity, public and community engagement, and sustainability. We envision Strategic Plan implementation as a real time, dynamic process, including catalyzing disruptive innovation. We will deploy actionable metrics tracked in a Strategic Plan Dashboard on the DevSci website to monitor progress and to ensure accountability. Your insights, feedback and partnership will be invaluable throughout this process.
Please join us as we embark on this next phase of our DevSci adventure. We aim for our Healthier, Earlier mission to be the engine of a well paved highway linking the very best science and methods to rapid, real world impact. With tools, partnerships and collective will, DevSci can meaningfully “move the dial “ in improving the lives and wellbeing of children and families with diverse lived experience as early as possible in the lifecycle and at its key inflection points.