Senior Research Scientist, Yale Child Study Center
David J. Lewkowicz is a developmental psychobiologist. He earned his BA from Brandeis University in 1974 and a PhD in biopsychology from the City University of New York in 1979. He then completed a post-doctoral fellowships in child mental health at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Yeshiva University in 1980. His first academic position was as an Assistant Professor at Vassar College (1980-1982). He then moved on to a career as a research scientist, first at the Illinois Institute for Developmental Disabilities and the Northwestern University School of Medicine in Chicago, IL (1982-1987), and then at the New York State Institute for Basic Research in Developmental Disabilities (1987-2003).
In 2003 Dr. Lewkowicz moved back to academia first as a full professor in the department of psychology at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) and the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Science at FAU (2003-2014) and then as a full professor in the department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Northeastern University in Boston, MA (2014-2019). In 2019 Dr. Lewkowicz was recruited as a Senior Research Scientist at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, CT with joint adjunct appointments in the department of psychology at Yale University and the Child Study Center in the Yale School of Medicine. Finally, in 2023 Haskins Laboratories transitioned into the Child Study Center in the Yale School of Medicine where Dr. Lewkowicz is currently a Senior Research Scientist and where he co-directs the LLAMB (Language Learning and Multisensory Brain) lab with Dr. Richard Aslin. In addition to these appointments, Dr. Lewkowicz has been an invited research scientist in the Laboratory of Developmental Psychobiology at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, France (1992), at the Centre Européen des Sciences du Goût in Dijon, France (2009), and in the Department of Psychology at the University of Padova in Italy (2019).
For most of his career, Dr. Lewkowicz’s research program has focused on the development of multisensory perception, attention, processing, and integration in typically developing infants. More recently, this focus has expanded to include studies of the development of multisensory perception, attention, processing, and integration in typically developing young children as well as adults with a special emphasis on the role that multisensory processes play in the development of speech, language, and social communication. In addition, most recently, Dr. Lewkowicz has collaborated with colleagues at Yale in studies of the development of multisensory perception and its role in the emergence of language in children with autism. Over the years, Dr. Lewkowicz’s research has been supported by funding from the New York State Office of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities, the March of Dimes Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation. Currently, Dr. Lewkowicz serves on the editorial board of Developmental Psychobiology. Dr. Lewkowicz has contributed some of the first-in-the-field and foundational empirical findings on the emergence of multisensory perceptual skills in human infants, has authored and co-authored many articles and chapters, and has edited several books on development. Among his original scientific discoveries are that newborn infants can integrate auditory and visual information, that infants undergo a paradoxical process of perceptual narrowing of audiovisual integration, and that lipreading of audiovisual speech first emerges in infancy.