Introducing the New ISSBD President-Elect, EC Members, and Early Career Scholars Reps.

She is the 2022 Chen Yidan Global Fellow of the Graduate School of Education, Harvard University. She was President of the European Association of Personality Psychology (EAPP, 2008-2010), President of the European Association of Developmental Psychology (EADP, 2013-2015), President of the International Consortium of Developmental Societies of Psychology (International Consortium of Developmental Science Societies, ICDSS, 2020-2022) and member of the Governing Council of the American Society for Developmental Psychology (Society for Research in Child Development, SRCD, 2015-2021).
She is now a member of the Governing Council of ISSBD. In 2017, she organized on behalf of ISSBD, together with Katariina Salmela-Aro, University of Helsinki, Finland, and Ingrid Schoon, University College London, UK, a Regional Workshop on the topic of Positive Youth Development in Times of Social Change. In 2020, she organized the 26th Biennial Meeting of the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development (ISSBD), which was canceled due to the COVID pandemic. In 2022, she was entrusted by ISSBD again to organize its 26th Biennial Meeting, which took place on the Island of Rhodes, Greece.
Professor Motti-Stefanidi studies the adaptation and resilience of adolescent immigrants and refugees through a risk and resilience developmental lens. She has presented the social policy implications of her work at different Working Groups of the European Parliament and at conferences organized by NGOs interested in the adaptation of migrant and refugee youth.

Since 2018, she has been a Member of the Board of Lecturers of the Doctorate in Personal and Educational Sciences (UCSC), a member of the Ethics Committee for Psychological Research (CERPS), and serves as secretary. Since 2020, she has been a member of the Selection Committee for the PhD program Science of Person and Education. Since 2022, she has been co-head of the Research Unit of Psychology and Robotics in the Life Cycle (UCSC). Currently, she is also a Member of the Board of Lecturers of the National Doctoral Program in Artificial Intelligence, University of Pisa

Since 2016, she has been a Member of the ISSBD, and in 2020, she was appointed as the Early Career Scholars Representative and then a member of the Executive Board. Also,  in 2021, she was appointed as a member of the Communication Committee, the Membership Committee, and part of the Scientific Committee for ISSBD Biennial Meeting 2022. Since 2017, she has been a Fellow of the Italian Association of Psychology (AIP), Developmental and Educational Psychology Section.

He has strong links with ISSBD since 2004. In that year, the conference was held in Ghent, Belgium. At that conference, he met Christina Salmivalli for the first time, which led to a long-term collaboration (14 papers together) and a visiting professorship at the University of Turku, Finland (2007-2012). He published three first-authored articles in our society’s journal, the International Journal of Behavioral Development (IJBD). In 2022, he edited a special issue on social norms for the journal.

In 2020, he received the ISSBD Fellowship status for my sustained outstanding contributions to the field of international lifespan human development. In 2022, he gave an ISSBD preconference workshop on The Prominent Role of Peers across Diverse Behaviors. In 2024, he gave a keynote at the ISSBD meeting in Lisbon, Portugal.

She is also the co-director of the ISSBD/Jacobs Foundation African professional development fellowship that brings together 10 fellows from different African countries for professional development opportunities. I have attended many ISSBD events since I joined the society. Currently, I am a reviewer for the United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI), UK.

She is interested in how human beings acquire and change behavior across the lifespan, and she believes environmental factors heavily shape developmental outcomes. Interventions aimed at improving the human condition needs to target individual environments and experiences. One of her current research foci is creating child-friendly preschool environments and experiences in rural areas of Africa. She has been awarded a Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) grant to complete one of these projects in rural Kenya and Zambia.

Her research has instilled in a strong background in studying development in varied contexts and teaches respect for diversity. One of her intentions is to advocate increasing diversity within the regional chapters of ISSBD. Her experience of working in cross-cultural teams as part of her Ph.D. and postdoc group has given her the confidence to engage and communicate with early career scholars from diverse cultural backgrounds.

Marvin will support educational and scholarship activities, and communicate up-to-date information about ISSBD activities to ISSBD early career scholars as he has the ability to establish connections with professors, graduate students, and professional growth networks with ease.