Searching for What Is Universal in Human Development

Dima Amso, who joined Columbia five years ago from Brown, runs the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Lab. Her lab thinks about how, in early childhood, the human brain adapts to its environment and develops sophisticated skills like attention, memory, and cognitive control. Amso’s work is markedly international: She’s collaborated on research projects in Malawi and South Africa, as well as pursuing research closer to home in New York City. One goal of that international work, she told Columbia News, is to distinguish what is universal about human development from what is culturally contingent. We caught up with Amso to discuss her path to Columbia and what she’s working on now.

What does your lab focus on generally?

Humans have an unusually long caregiving period, which means there’s a long time for babies and young children to take their time and allocate resources to growth and learning about and adapting to the world around them, which is relatively rare among species. Horses, for example, start running almost as soon as they’re born, whereas human children go through an extended period of exploring the world while stationary, and then while crawling, before they start to walk. In optimal circumstances, they have a predictable and reliable caregiver taking care of their needs along the way.

There are also a lot of opportunities early in postnatal life that never happen quite the same way again. Children can learn multiple languages, often with ease and no accent, and they can learn a range of other skills: If you told a young child to learn to walk on their elbows, they could likely learn to do it, in a way that no adult can. So the question we ask is what is happening that allows that kind of rapid, incredible change?

You have been working on studies in Malawi and South Africa, among other countries. What draws you to conduct studies abroad?

We work locally and we also work globally, since you can’t understand human brain development just by studying kids in New York City. International research can help us understand what is culturally specific, and what is universal to the biology of the human organism. The field has really started to recognize the importance of this in the past few years and to recognize that unless we are able to look more globally we are potentially creating biased science.

Are these international studies related to your work with NGOs?

No, that work is separate. The goal there is really to work with organizations that meet needs in emergency circumstances, like after a natural disaster, or amid a refugee crisis.

What can happen is that these programs are trying to figure out how to support the community and improve mental health, but they don’t necessarily have access to the best science. So my work in that context has been to partner with these organizations as a research support team. The organizations might be asking questions like, “we’re working with a lot of 15-year-olds who just lost access to schooling, what should we do to help them?”

And what we can do is come together as a lab team and generate evidence, make it available to them in a legible form, and support them in developing well-informed programming.

What led you to collaborate in that way with NGOs?

I was born in Syria. And when the Syrian refugee crisis became full blown, I had just gotten tenure at Brown. I felt like the combination of knowing about the country and the people personally and being far enough along in my career felt like I had enough knowledge to contribute ethically really spurred me to action. During that crisis, I went to Jordan, and I had the opportunity to meet people and sit in the refugee camps and talk to them for a bit, and understand their needs. And I also had the opportunity to meet with NGO leaders, and I started to better understand their needs, and the gap they felt between research and on-the-ground work. It felt like somewhere I could be helpful.

We don’t only do this work abroad. When my lab moved to New York five years ago, we connected with groups like the Boys Club of New York. We worked with their teams in the wake of COVID, and the mental health issues that kids were experiencing because of the pandemic. The NGO work comes and goes with local and world events.

Can you tell us about your new research on the microbiome?

We like to combine as many measures as possible on growing children, to best understand brain and body development dynamics. In collaboration with colleagues who study the microbiome, we are starting to explore the role of the gut microbiome in brain and behavioral development across global cohorts.

Do you have any favorite campus hobbies?

I take cuttings from plants on campus sometimes. The hydrangeas here are wonderful. I’m growing them in my New York City apartment now. We’ll see how it goes.