Eps 158: From Goldfish to Global Develpment: How Unexpected Turns Shape a Research Career

Dr. Iverson’s career has been colored by a series of unexpected events, each of which have taken her work and interests in new directions. Her initial foray into psychological research – asenior thesis focused on learning in cassius auratus (the goldfish) – led to an opportunity to work in a child language lab and subsequently to spending a year living in Rome and conducting research on the development of gesture and language in very young children. Her doctoral training in developmental psychology and language acquisition led to a postdoctoralfellowship with Esther Thelen, where she spent a lot of time trying to understand what others in the Motor Development Lab were talking about (torque? attractor state?) and developing a deepand lasting fascination with motor development. A move to the University of Pittsburgh in 2003 coincided with the award of a small grant to study the early development of infants with an older autistic sibling. This work became the impetus for combining her longstanding research on communicative and language development with her interest in motor development, with the goal of understanding how advances in the development of motor skills create rich new opportunities for infants to engage with objects and people and to do so in progressively more sophisticated ways. Dr. Iverson came to BU in 2022 with the goal of using this framework to develop interventions supporting early mobility and global development in infants and toddlers with motor delays and disabilities.