About Us

Our institute’s intensive focus on early life mechanisms of lifespan health – beginning in pregnancy – reflects the fact that this is a sensitive period for health and development with a profound impact on the lifespan. By examining mutable early life mechanisms and their intersection with ongoing developmental experience – we aim to generate science and application that can improve life outlook and health outcomes with the broadest impact possible.

Institutional Vision

The vision of the DevSci Institute is to motivate and lead transformative science to engender a “healthier, earlier” population– beginning even before birth– and continuing throughout the lifespan. Via transdisciplinary developmental sciences integration and innovation focused on improving health within diverse family, community, and population contexts, we will enable scientific breakthroughs and applications. These will improve the quality of children’s lives and reduce the disease burden of age-related maladies in a manner fundamentally different from other existing child health initiatives.

Our Mission

The Institute for Innovations in Developmental Sciences (DevSci)’s “Healthier, Earlier” mission is to promote robust foundations of health, wellbeing, and learning for all children as early as possible for optimal outcomes. Advancing developmental health equity is at the core of this mission. DevSci achieves its mission by: (a) catalyzing boundary spanning research and training across varied developmental sciences disciplines and methods through its innovative structure; (b) enabling scientific and training platforms; and (c) accelerating developmental science discovery translation to real world impact.

Learn about our strategic plan

DevSci Visual Identity

Please contact paige.fix@northwestern.edu for more information.

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