Daniel P. Keating

Daniel P. Keating is Professor of Psychology, Psychiatry, and Pediatrics; Research Professor, Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. He is a Fellow in CIFAR's Successful Societies Program, and was previously the Director of CIFAR's Human Development Program, which ran from 1993-2003.

Before joining the University of Michigan in 2004, Dr. Keating was a Professor in the Department of Human Development and Applied Psychology, and the Atkinson Professor of Early Child Development and Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto (OISE/UT).  Prior to joining OISE in 1987, he served on the faculties of the University of Minnesota (Institute for Child Development, 1974-1980) and the University of Maryland (Psychology and Education, 1980-1987), where he was also the founding Director of the Ph.D. program in Applied Developmental Psychology.  In 1985 he was a Visiting Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education in Berlin, Germany.  Dr. Keating received his B.A. in Psychology from the College of the Holy Cross in 1971 and a M.A. and Ph.D. in Psychology from The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1973.

Dr. Keating is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, in three different divisions: Developmental Psychology, Educational Psychology, and Child, Youth and Family Services.  He is also a member of the Society for Research in Child Development, and the Society for Research in Adolescence.  He has served on numerous Editorial Boards for scholarly journals, and is also a frequent reviewer for granting agencies.

Dr. Keating has written extensively on society and human development, particularly on the developmental sources of human diversity. He has written/edited eight books (including the Human Development Program's Developmental Health and the Wealth of Nations, edited by Keating and Hertzman, Guilford Press, 1999; and the forthcoming Nature and Nurture in Early Child Development, Cambridge University Press - which includes contributions from eight CIFAR Program Members or Advisors in two Programs, Successful Societies and Experience-based Brain and Biological Development), and has contributed over one hundred papers to scientific journals and scholarly collections. He is frequently invited to address groups across Canada, in the U.S.A., and in Europe; most often to discuss his research on how our social environments shape the way we develop, and how social institutions need to change in order to work effectively with increasingly diverse populations.

Dr. Keating's most recent work has focused on two areas:

Development and extension of a biodevelopmental mediator model for understanding the developmental mechanisms of social disparities and the social gradient. The launch of this work was the Keating & Tom Boyce (of CIFAR's EBBD Program) in 2004 and with Dr. Keating's post-doctoral researcher, Sharon Simonton (2008), in the SSP volume ("Successful societies: Institutions, cultural repertoires, and health" edited by Peter Hall and Michele Lamont for the Successful Societies Program, and in "Nature and nurture in early child development" edited by Dr. Keating.  Intensive new empirical work will become possible with the launch of the U.S. National Children’s Study, with which he works as an investigator in a number of roles.

Initiation of a theoretical and now empirical line of work on adolescent cognitive and brain development, the social influences on that development and the consequences for adolescent behavioral health, based on theoretical integrations in two recent handbook contributions. Dr. Keating and his team are currently testing whether neurocognitive development is a significant mediator of social disparities in adolescent risk-taking as it relates to behavioral health.  In addition, publications on adolescent executive function are in progress, based on the national birth cohort from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development.