School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 1-10 of 13 Results

  • Virginia A. Marchman

    Virginia A. Marchman

    Casual - Non-Exempt, Psychology
    Staff, Psychology

    BioAs a developmental psychologist, my main areas of research are language development, language disorders, and early childhood development. I have worked extensively with parent report measures of early vocabulary, specifically, the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs). I serve on the CDI Advisory Board, and have worked on many projects including the Web-CDI, the CDI Scoring program, and Wordbank, an open repository of CDI instruments from many different languages. My current studies examine links between children's language processing skill, early learning environments, and individual differences in language development in monolingual and bilingual learners from diverse backgrounds. Our team also explores the importance of environmental stimulation in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), showing that early engagement in developmental care activities (e.g., skin-to-skin care, holding, talking) has important consequences for positive neurological and behavioral outcomes. I am also involved in a large-scale NIH-funded project following infants born preterm from birth to 18 months, examining the neurodevelopmental and environmental influences on development in this at risk population. In addition to conducting studies that have a basic science focus, I have also been Director of Program Evaluation for the Habla Conmigo project, overseeing the evaluation of parenting intervention programs designed to facilitate caregiver engagement in Latina mothers and their young children.

  • Javier Mejia

    Javier Mejia

    Postdoc Res Affiliate, Political Science

    BioJavier Mejia is an economist whose work focuses on the intersection between social networks and economic history. His interests extend to topics on entrepreneurship and political economy with a geographical specialty in Latin America and the Middle East. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. He has been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University--Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux.

    Most of Javier’s research explores how social interactions have shaped the economy in the long term. He brings together theoretical and empirical methods from economics and conceptual tools from anthropology to the study of history. This has led him to explore an extensive set of historical objects. He has studied entrepreneurs in Colombia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, industrial elites in Morocco in the late 20th century, tribal societies in North Africa in the 19th century, early Muslim communities in the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula between the 7th and 9th centuries, and political elites in Colombia and the US in the early 19th century.

    Javier has teaching experience in multicultural environments, having taught at universities in Latin America, the United States, and the Middle East. He has taught courses on economic growth, economic history, and economic theory. At Stanford, he offers two courses that jointly provide an overview of economic evolution from a global-history and moral-philosophy perspective. On the one hand, Wealth of Nations studies the origins of economic development, the moral dilemmas underneath the development process, and the path that led to the configuration of the modern global economy. On the other hand, Societal Collapse studies the causes of economic decline, the social and political consequences of that decline, and the path that led to the disappearance of some of the most prosperous societies in human history.

    Javier is a regular contributor to different news outlets. Currently, he is a Forbes Magazine op-ed columnist.