Professor Virginia Slaughter 

Virginia Slaughter is Professor of Psychology and Dean of the Graduate Research School at the University of Queensland, Australia. Virginia earned a BA in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College (New York) in 1985 and a PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1994.  After completing a postdoc at MIT, in 1996 she took up a Level B lectureship at the University of Queensland, where she founded the Early Cognitive Development Centre within the School of Psychology.  Over the last 30 years her research has focused on social and cognitive development in infants and young children, particularly the acquisition of imitation, mindreading and peer interaction skills. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.