Charles Nelson, Ph.D.

Charles A. Nelson III is a professor of pediatrics and neuroscience and a professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a professor of education in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Elsewhere at Harvard, he holds the Richard David Scott Chair in Pediatric Developmental Medicine Research and is director of research in the Division of Developmental Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital.

His research interests center on a variety of problems in developmental cognitive neuroscience, including: typical and atypical memory development; the development of social perception; developmental trajectories to autism; and the effects of early adversity on brain and behavioral development.

He chaired the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Early Experience and Brain Development and served on the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) panels that wrote From Neurons to Neighborhoods and, more recently, New Directions in Child Abuse and Neglect Research. Among his many honors, he has received the Leon Eisenberg award from Harvard Medical School, the T. Berry Brazelton Innovation award from Boston Children’s Hospital, an honorary doctorate from Bucharest University (Romania), the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation Ruane Prize in Child Psychiatry; was a resident fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center (Italy); and has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.