As an undergraduate, I knew nothing
about the social sciences.
My intent was to go to medical school.
I did five years of training and
pharmacy, and my interest was in
looking at the impact of medicinal
chemical compounds on human biology.
Basically math and science, and
I ended up taking a couple of courses
after I was practicing pharmacy, and they
were in the social sciences,
and I took Psychology 101,
then I took a research methods course
and they invited me into psychology,
and that was the best thing
that's ever happened in my life.
I became aware of the importance
of developmental science
as an undergraduate in college,
and I was taking a course on psychology
and really became excited by the idea of
trying to understand how the mind works
and how people's behaviors could be explained.
Especially with regards to issues of morality
and what we call 'prosociality,'
so this idea of being kind
and generous and nice to each other.
I started research in psychology when I
was in my second year of undergraduate.
So, I fell in love with the notion of trying
to figure out why things work the way they do,
and what matters in a human life,
you know, to make us who we are.
This was at the time when we were very few
so-called "minorities" in the field.
I grew up in a household where
my father was a physician,
so I knew for sure
I wanted to be a pediatrician,
until I got to college and faced physics and
organic chemistry and things like that.
So then I wasn't sure what I wanted to do,
and I ran across a program at University
of Michigan in community psychology
that focused on social justice
issues and social change,
so that just really intrigued me
and I was introduced there to a lot of
developmental scientists, and a lot of
work in developmental science.
I came to realize that going into
developmental sciences was for me
in my junior year in undergraduate
school at Howard University.
I really wanted to try and improve
perceptions of black children.
Jensen and some others had said,
"Black children were inferior. They couldn't learn,"
and I thought that my lived experience in
New Orleans Public Schools
didn't give me that notion at all, and
I learned that you could do this through research.
So I switched from pediatrics and
started thinking about psychology and
child development as a field.
Initially, I was interested in clinical work,
so in clinical psychology,
and I just happened to, for one of
my first classes in a Master's program--
I actually had no background in psychology.
My background is in music and
English and the humanities.
My first semester I ran across a study
that was a 10-year follow-up
of a program for adolescent
mothers and their infants and toddlers
and it had some pretty amazing 10-year
effects on both the moms and the kids
and that got me interested in, really a lot of
the issues I'm still interested in now,
which is how to craft programs and
policies that are responsive to the
needs of children and youth.
Ever since I was a little girl,
I was interested in kids,
and I wanted to kind of look at
what are the ways in which we can
improve the way they turn out.
Being the most vulnerable population,
members of a population,
it's easy to see how they
can not end up in a good place.
So, I've been always interested in
figuring out how do people, you know,
how do parents help them, how do teachers help them, how do they turn out the way they do,
and what can I do? What's my 
role in that process? Can I help?
So I think that led me to developmental science,
which really is a purpose, or the goal of it is
just to come up with research that helps
to promote the development of children
so I was hooked.
