Bio

Charles A. Nelson III, PhD, is currently Professor of Pediatrics and Neuroscience and Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and Professor of Education in the Harvard Graduate School of Education.  He also holds the Richard David Scott Chair in Pediatric Developmental Medicine Research at Boston Children’s Hospital. His research interests center on a variety of problems in developmental cognitive neuroscience, including: the development of social perception; developmental trajectories to autism; and the effects of early adversity on brain and behavioral development. He chaired the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Early Experience and Brain Development and served on the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) panels that wrote From Neurons to Neighborhoods, and more recently, New Directions in Child Abuse and Neglect Research.  Among his many honors he has received the Leon Eisenberg award from Harvard Medical School, an honorary Doctorate from Bucharest University (Romania), was a resident fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center (Italy), has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and received the Ruane Prize for Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Research from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation.