Please welcome our newest faculty members, Anthony Burrow and Jane Mendle, to the department of human development in Cornell's College of Human Ecology. 

Burrow

Anthony Burrow is an assistant professor in the department of human development and the director of the Identity Processes Laboratory. His research focuses on youth purpose, racial identity, and the psychosocial adjustment of minority youth. His primary line of research examines how racial identity, in particular, influences the psychological adjustment to negative experiences reported by minorities. Two questions guiding this research ask: How do salient aspects of racial identity function as sources of resilience in the face of negative daily experiences, and how do these relations unfold over time?    

Burrow’s recent projects have centered on delineating trajectories of the daily and momentary variability of racial identity among African American college students and determining how racial identity influences individuals’ exposure and reactivity to repeated experiences of racism and discrimination. A second line of inquiry concerns the role of identifying and committing to a sense of purpose in life. 

Burrow comes to us from Loyola University of Chicago where he was Assistant professor in the department of psychology. Prior to that he held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Multicultural Research Institute at the University of Notre Dame. 

Mendle

Jane Mendle is an assistant professor in the department of human development. Her research focuses on adolescent psychopathology. At the heart of her research is the question of why some children grow up to be well-adjusted adolescents and others do not. She is particularly interested in how different aspects of puberty – its timing and tempo, its early-life antecedents, and the ways that children, peers, and family members perceive and understand it – lay the groundwork for future adjustment or maladjustment. Because puberty is a transition which spans biological, social, and psychological domains, her research is inherently interdisciplinary, integrating developmental psychopathology with behavior genetics, public health, evolutionary psychology, and epidemiology. 

Mendle’s recent projects have investigated the salience of pubertal tempo, looking at the developmental demands and effect s of the rate of passing through puberty. Another line of inquiry investigated family structure and maturation, identifying potential gene-environment interactions influencing the age of menarche in girls and sexual initiation in boys. Other work included studies of trajectories and risks in juvenile externalizing behavior, including studies on academic achievement and risky sexual behavior. 

Mendle comes to us from the University of Oregon where she was assistance professor of psychology. Prior to that she completed a pre-doctoral clinical psychology internship at Weill Cornell Medical College.