Official Story
Karen E. Adolph is Professor of Psychology, Applied Psychology, and Neural Science at New York University. She uses observable motor behaviors and a variety of technologies (video, motion tracking, instrumented floor, head-mounted eye tracking, EEG, etc.) to study developmental processes. Adolph is Director of the Databrary video library and the PLAY project, and she developed and maintains the Datavyu video-coding tool. Adolph received a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and Ph.D. from Emory University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and Association for Psychological Science and is Past-President of the International Congress on Infant Studies. She received the Kurt Koffka Medal for "worldwide outstanding work on infants' perception/action development", a Cattell Sabbatical Award, the APF Fantz Memorial Award, the APA Boyd McCandless Award, the ICIS Young Investigator Award, FIRST and MERIT awards from NICHD, and five teaching awards from NYU. She chaired the NIH study section on Motor Function and Speech Rehabilitation and serves on the McDonnell Foundation advisory board and editorial boards of Developmental Psychobiology and Motor Learning and Development. Adolph has published 165+ articles and chapters. Her research on perceptual-motor learning and development has been continually funded by NIH since 1991. She currently holds 12 grants.
Unofficial Story
Karen is a true imposter in motor development (no background in math, physics, biology, physiology, or movement science). At 17, she quit high school, moved out of her parents' home, and worked as a proofreader and seamstress. She met her actor boyfriend of the next 17 years in the costume shop of a regional theater and began a commuting relationship. After four attempts at college, she graduated from Sarah Lawrence deeply in debt, but steeped in preschool education, fine art, and James Gibson's ecological approach to perception and action. After a year teaching art at the Dalton School (K-3), she was ready for graduate studies. James Gibson was dead, but Eleanor "Jackie" Gibson was not. Jackie could not take graduate students at Cornell, so Dick Neisser brought Jackie and Karen to Emory, where Karen studied infants' perception of affordances for locomotion over slopes. She nearly failed her qualifying exam on the development of walking because the topic was "not sufficiently psychological". So she wrote a predoctoral NRSA and moved her slopes apparatus to Indiana University where Esther Thelen studied walking. Karen turned down a job at Vassar to finish the longitudinal study in her dissertation. All three advisors - Gibson, Neisser, and Thelen - rejected her dissertation, so she wrote a new one that became an SRCD monograph and an article in JEP:HPP. Still trying to get a job in NYC to be with the actor boyfriend, she interviewed unsuccessfully at NYU, did a brief postdoc at Einstein, and then commuted to NYC from a faculty position at Carnegie Mellon. At CMU, she helped to develop a video-coding tool that evolved into Datavyu. After receiving an NIH FIRST award, she interviewed again at NYU. This time, she got the job, but split from the actor, and started a new commuting relationship with a professor at University of Pittsburgh (dramatic irony) who married her and fathered a wonderful daughter. After 12 years, they amicably separated, and Karen started her current commute with a professor at University of Iowa, with whom she bought a house in Maine. (Geography was never her strong point.) A CMU design professor builds the apparatuses (slopes, gaps, bridges, drop-offs, apertures, foam pits, etc.) that furnish her lab. Her 22-year collaboration with NYU professor Catherine Tamis-LeMonda is her longest in-town relationship. Karen directs the Databrary project with Rick Gilmore (her first teaching assistant at CMU), and with Cathie, they run the NIH-PLAY project.