Charles A. Nelson III

Dr. Charles A Nelson

Charles A. Nelson III is an American neuroscientist and psychologist.[1] Dr. Nelson is particularly interested in both genetic and environmental factors that can alter the course of brain development. Here he has paid particular attention to the role of experience in influencing the course of early brain development. In the first half of his career, he studied the neural correlates and developmental course of face and facial emotion processing. Later in his career, he turned his attention to studies of children growing up exposed to high levels of stress and adversity. Examples include his collaborative work (with Drs. Nathan A. Fox, PhD, University of Maryland, and Charles H. Zeanah, MD, Tulane University) in Romania (Bucharest Early Intervention Project - BEIP),[2] and work in Dhaka, Bangladesh (Bangladesh Early Adversity Neuroimaging – BEAN – project).[3] In this work, he has identified critical periods that have a profound effect on whether early experience has a positive or negative impact on the course of development.

A second manifestation of his interest in factors that can undermine healthy brain development is his work on trajectories to autism.  Here, he has focused on the use of EEG to identify neural "signatures" in the first half-year of life that are associated with autism outcomes at 2 and 3 years of age.  One line of work, in collaboration with Helen Tager Flusberg, PhD (Boston University), has focused on infants with an older sibling with autism (Infant Sibling Project – ISP).[4] Such "infant sibs" have a 20% elevated likelihood of developing autism. A more recent study, in collaboration with Carol Wilkinson, MD, Ph.D., focuses on how EEG obtained in infancy can be used to predict a variety of developmental outcomes, including autism. This project takes place in a primary care setting and includes a diverse community-based population of infants, including many children growing up in low-resource and high-stress households.

Over the course of his career, Dr. Nelson has worked extensively with print, radio, internet, and television media to talk about his work; he has also given major talks to governments all over the world about the role of experience in influencing the course of human brain development, including Senate and Congressional testimony in the US and many foreign governments.

Dr. Nelson has also played leadership roles in multiple large-scale projects and endeavors; for example, from 1998-2005 he chaired the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Early Experience and Brain Development, and he currently serves as the Co-Director of the Coordinating Council (along with Dr. Tina Chambers of UCSD) of the NIH-funded Healthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) Study.[5]

Dr. Nelson is a Professor of Pediatrics and Neuroscience and a Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Education at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, and a Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Human Development and Health at the Harvard School of Public Health.[6] Nelson is also the Director of Research and Director of the Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Division of Developmental Medicine at Boston Children's Hospital[7], where he also holds the Richard David Scott Chair in Pediatric Developmental Medicine Research.

Dr. Nelson chaired the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Early Experience and Brain Development[8] and served on the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) panels that wrote From Neurons to Neighborhoods,[9], New Directions in Child Abuse and Neglect Research, and the Committee on the Role of Seafood Consumption on Child Growth and Development. Among his many honors he has received the Leon Eisenberg award from Harvard Medical School, an honorary Doctorate from Bucharest University (Romania), was a resident fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio (Italy) Center, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine,[10] the British Academy [11] and along with Professors Fox and Zeanah has received the Ruane Prize for Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Research from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation.[12] In 2021 he received the Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize.[13] In 2023 he received the Society for Research in Child Development Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Child Development Award.[14]

Early career

Nelson completed his undergraduate degree at McGill University in Montreal in 1975.[15] He received two master's degrees from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, an M.S. in educational psychology in 1976 and an M.S. in psychology in 1977, and received his Ph.D. in child and developmental psychology from the University of Kansas in 1981.[16]

Under the auspices of an NIH F32 award, Nelson completed postdoctoral training in electrophysiology at the University of Minnesota from 1981 to 1983, took his first faculty position at Purdue University in 1983, and moved back to the University of Minnesota in 1986 to join the faculty in the Institute of Child Development. Nelson's research laboratory at the University of Minnesota used electroencephalography to study the development of young children, particularly face processing and memory development.[17] Dr. Nelson moved to Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital in 2005.

Nelson Lab Studies

Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP)

Nelson is a lead researcher in the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, along with colleagues Nathan Fox and Charles Zeanah. The three researchers began the project in Bucharest, Romania, in 2000. In the study, infants, abandoned since birth and raised in institutions in Bucharest, were randomly assigned either to be removed from the institution and placed into foster care or to remain in the institutions.[18] The study is designed to examine the effects of institutionalization on the brain and behavioral development of young children and to determine if these effects can be remediated through intervention, in this case foster care. To date, BEIP has demonstrated that children raised in institutions suffer from a range of significant developmental challenges, and that children removed from institutional care and placed in high-quality foster care have far better developmental outcomes than children who remain in institutions, but the degree of recovery from institutional care is largely mediated by how long children remain in an institution.[19]

The project has continued to follow participants through adolescence and into adulthood. More recent work has examined the long-term effects of early institutionalization and foster care on brain and behavioral development, adaptive functioning, physical health, and other outcomes. The longitudinal findings have continued to show that the timing and quality of early caregiving experiences are associated with developmental outcomes later in life.[20][21][22]

Bangladesh Early Adversity Project (BEAN)

The Bangladesh Early Adversity Project aims to assess the effects of early adversities (e.g., biological, environmental, psychosocial) on child cognitive development. To do this, Nelson established a neuroimaging lab in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where the project studies numerous cohorts below 5 years of age using methods such as EEG, fNIRS, and MRI as well as behavioral measures.[23]

Work from the BEAN project has continued to examine how biological and psychosocial adversity are associated with brain and cognitive development. Studies from the project have examined factors such as socioeconomic conditions, nutrition, growth, and inflammation using measures including EEG, fNIRS, MRI, and behavioral assessments.[24][25][26]

Emotion Project

The Emotion Project is a large, longitudinal study that explores how the nature and neural architecture of emotion processing develops from infancy to early childhood. 807 typically-developing infants participated in the study at either 5, 7, or 12 months of age.[27] The data collected over the course of this study helped Nelson and his collaborator, Dr. Michelle Bosquet, assess how young children's differing perceptions of emotions could predict future childhood behaviors, particularly internalizing disorders.[28]

Infant Sibling Project and Infant Screening Project

Despite tremendous advances being made in human understanding of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the average age of diagnosis of an ASD in the United States is ~4 years of age, although in some cases a reliable diagnosis can be made as young as 18 months.[29] The goal of the Infant Sibling and Infant Screening Projects is to find signs that suggest risk for this disorder between infants with an older sibling with an autism spectrum disorder, typically developing infants, and those displaying developmental concern based on early differences detected on a screening tool.[30]

Baby Steps Study

The Baby Steps Study is an extension of the Infant Sibling/Screening projects and is a longitudinal study being conducted in Boston Children's Hospital Primary Care Clinic. With his collaborators Drs Carol Wilkinson, Kathleen Conroy, and Helen Tager-Flusberg, the study examines whether EEG can be incorporated into a primary care setting and whether brain activity measured during infancy can help predict later developmental outcomes, including autism and developmental delay. [31]

Baby Steps grew out of an earlier study of children growing up in low-resource urban households. The study follows a large, diverse, community-based sample of infants and includes EEG measurements collected during the first year of life. One goal of the project is to determine whether methods traditionally used in a research laboratory can be applied in a clinical setting to improve the study and early identification of developmental differences.[31]

Healthy Brain and Child Development Study (HBCD)

Nelson is the Co-Director (along with Dr. Tina Chambers of UCSD) of the Consortium Administrative Core for the Healthy Brain and Child Development Study. HBCD is a nationwide longitudinal study designed to examine brain and behavioral development beginning during pregnancy and continuing through childhood, with particular attention to both harmful and protective environmental factors.[32]

The HBCD consortium includes 27 recruitment sites across the United States[32] and collected a variety of biological, behavioral, and neuroimaging measures. These include MRI, EEG, biospecimens, measures of cognitive and behavioral development, and information about children's prenatal and postnatal environments. The study began releasing data to the scientific community in 2025.[33]

Bibliography

Peer-reviewed journal articles

Books

  • Lazerson, Floyd E. Bloom; Charles A. Nelson; Arlyne; Bloom, Floyd; Lazerson, Arlyne (2001). Brain, mind, and behavior (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Worth Publ. ISBN 978-0-7167-2389-9.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  • Nelson, Charles A.; de Haan, Michelle; Thomas, Kathleen M. (2006). Neuroscience and Cognitive Development: The Role of Experience and the Developing Brain. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.
  • Nelson, Charles A.; Fox, Nathan A.; Zeanah, Charles H. (2014). Romania's abandoned children: deprivation, brain development, and the struggle for recovery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Essays and reporting

References

  1. ↑ Xie, W; McCormick, SA; Westerlund, A; Bowman, LC; Nelson, CA (1 October 2018). "Neural correlates of facial emotion processing in infancy". Developmental Science. 6 (1) e12758. doi:10.1111/desc.12758. PMC 6443490. PMID 30276933.
  2. ↑ "Bucharest Early Intervention Project".
  3. ↑ "Bangladesh Early Adversity Neuroimaging Project".
  4. ↑ "Infant Sibling Project".
  5. ↑ "Healthy Brain and Child Development Study".
  6. ↑ "Charles A. Nelson III Harvard Faculty Page".
  7. ↑ "Boston Children's Hospital Faculty: Charles A. Nelson".
  8. ↑ "MacArthur Foundation". www.macfound.org. MacArthur Foundation. Retrieved 27 July 2018.
  9. ↑ "From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-12-03.
  10. ↑ "National Academy of Medicine Elects 85 New Members - National Academy of Medicine". National Academy of Medicine. 15 October 2018.
  11. ↑ "Seven faculty members named British Academy Fellows". 7 October 2020.
  12. ↑ "Charles A. Nelson III, Ph.D." 25 October 2017.
  13. ↑ "2021 Research Prize".
  14. ↑ "2023 SRCD Biennial Awardees". Society for Research in Child Development. 25 January 2023. Retrieved 18 August 2026.
  15. ↑ Weintraub, Karen (February 17, 2014). "Bringing home plight of abandoned children", The Boston Globe. Retrieved September 23, 2014.
  16. ↑ "Charles A. Nelson, PhD Archived September 9, 2014, at the Wayback Machine", Boston's Children's Hospital. Retrieved September 23, 2014.
  17. ↑ Hughes, Virginia (July 29, 2013). "Detachment: How can scientists act ethically when they are studying the victims of a human tragedy, such as the Romanian orphans?", Aeon. Retrieved September 23, 2014.
  18. ↑ Zeanah, CH; Nelson, CA; Fox, NA; Smyke, AT; Marshall, P; Parker, SW; Koga, S (2003). "Designing research to study the effects of institutionalization on brain and behavioral development: the Bucharest Early Intervention Project". Development and Psychopathology. 15 (4): 885–907. doi:10.1017/s0954579403000452. PMID 14984131. S2CID 16966106.
  19. ↑ Zeanah, Charles; Nelson, Charles; Fox, Nathan; Smyke, Anna; Marshall, Peter; Parker, Susan; Koga, Sebastian (February 2003). "Designing research to study the effects of institutionalization on brain and behavioral development: The Bucharest Early Intervention Project". Development and Psychopathology. 15 (4): 885–907. doi:10.1017/S0954579403000452. PMID 14984131. S2CID 16966106.
  20. ↑ Hare, Megan M.; Humphreys, Kathryn L.; Cosmoiu, Ana; Fox, Nathan A.; Nelson, Charles A.; Zeanah, Charles H. (July 2026). "Adaptive Functioning at Age 18 Years Following Severe Early Deprivation: Results of a Randomized Controlled Trial". Developmental Psychology. 62 (7): 1393–1402. doi:10.1037/dev0002029. PMC 12465061. PMID 40638296.
  21. ↑ Mens, Michelle M. J.; Jopling, Ellen; Hare, Megan; Drury, Stacy S.; Nelson, Charles A.; Zeanah, Charles H.; Fox, Nathan A.; Slopen, Natalie (15 May 2026). "Long-term cardiometabolic effects of early institutionalization and foster care: Evidence from the Bucharest Early Intervention Project". Development and Psychopathology: 1–12. doi:10.1017/S0954579426101540. PMC 13222762. PMID 42138119.
  22. ↑ Andujar, Marta; Liuzzi, Lucrezia; Pine, Daniel S.; Nelson, Charles A.; Zeanah, Charles H.; Fox, Nathan A.; Averbeck, Bruno B. (10 February 2026). "Early psychosocial deprivation alters the refinement of neural dynamics across adolescence". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 123 (6) e2514979123. Bibcode:2026PNAS..12314979A. doi:10.1073/pnas.2514979123. PMC 12890782. PMID 41628338.
  23. ↑ "Early adversity and brain development in Bangladesh". Vector. 2015-06-09.
  24. ↑ Pirazzoli, Laura; Sullivan, Eileen; Xie, Wanze; Richards, John E.; Bulgarelli, Chiara; Lloyd-Fox, Sarah; Shama, Talat; Kakon, Shahria H.; Haque, Rashidul; Petri, William A.; Nelson, Charles A. (2022). "Association of psychosocial adversity and social information processing in children raised in a low-resource setting: a fNIRS study". Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. 56 101125. doi:10.1016/j.dcn.2022.101125. PMC 9241055. PMID 35763916.
  25. ↑ Turesky, Theodore K.; Pirazzoli, Laura; Shama, Talat; Kakon, Shahria H.; Haque, Rashidul; Islam, Najmul; Someshwar, Archana; Gagoski, Borjan; Petri, William A.; Nelson, Charles A.; Gaab, Nadine (2024). "Brain morphometry and chronic inflammation in Bangladeshi children growing up in extreme poverty". Imaging Neuroscience. 2 imag-2-00319: 1–16. doi:10.1162/imag_a_00319. PMC 12290609. PMID 40800433.
  26. ↑ Valdes, Viviane; Sullivan, Eileen F.; Tofail, Fahmida; Thompson, Lisa M.; Kakon, Shahria H.; Shama, Talat; Haque, Rashidul; Nelson, Charles A. (January 2025). "Trajectories and social determinants of child cognitive development: a prospective cohort study from infancy through middle childhood in Dhaka, Bangladesh". The Lancet Regional Health - Southeast Asia. 32 100511. doi:10.1016/j.lansea.2024.100511. PMC 11626075. PMID 39655248.
  27. ↑ "Emotion Processing in Infancy and Early Childhood". Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience.
  28. ↑ Bayet, Laurie; Behrendt, Hannah F.; Cataldo, Julia K.; Westerlund, Alissa; Nelson, Charles A. (December 2018). "Recognition of facial emotions of varying intensities by three-year-olds". Developmental Psychology. 54 (12): 2240–2247. doi:10.1037/dev0000588. PMC 6263821. PMID 30335429.
  29. ↑ "Frequently Asked Questions". Autism Speaks.
  30. ↑ "Infant Screening Project". Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience. Retrieved 8 May 2018.
  31. 1 2 Conroy, Kathleen; Wilkinson, Carol L.; Francis, Brianna; Said, Alex Job; Constantino, Celia; Chung, Haerin; Tager-Flusberg, Helen; Nelson, Charles A. (March 2026). "Feasibility of Large-Scale Development-Focused EEG Research in a Hospital-Based Primary Care Setting". Academic Pediatrics. 26 (2) 103163. doi:10.1016/j.acap.2025.103163. PMC 12884331. PMID 41161483.
  32. 1 2 "Recruitment Sites". Healthy Brain and Child Development Study. Retrieved 18 August 2026.
  33. ↑ "Data Sharing". Healthy Brain and Child Development Study. Retrieved 18 August 2026.
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