Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

Over the fellowship year, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang will continue work on a new scholarly book that integrates neuroscientific, psychological, and educational perspectives on how adolescents’ disposition to grapple with ethical, personal, and systems-level complexities of information and situations—what she has termed transcendent thinking—contributes to neural and psychosocial development. Drawing on her two decades of inter- and transdisciplinary empirical research and theory building, as well as a wide range of biological and social science, the book will advance a new developmental humanism, revealing how adolescents’ capacity for transcendent thinking emerges as a neurobiological and psychosocial foundation for wellbeing, creativity, productivity and civic life.

Immordino-Yang is the Fahmy & Donna Attallah Professor of Humanistic Psychology at the University of Southern California, where she is professor of education, psychology and neuroscience and founding director of the USC Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education (CANDLE). Her work aims to improve education and the human condition through developmental science, in collaboration with youth and educators. Immordino-Yang was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Education in 2023 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2025.For more information, please visit: candle.usc.edu