John Colombo

John Colombo serves as the director and principal investigator of the University of Kansas Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (IDDRC). He became the third director of the KU Life Span Institute in September 2007. Professor Colombo has previously served the University of Kansas as faculty chair of the Human Subjects Committee on the Lawrence campus (1993-2012), as an associate dean of KU’s Graduate School (2001-2004) and as acting chair of the Department of Psychology (2005-2006). He joined the KU faculty in 1988 preceded by six years as a postdoctoral trainee and research associate. Along with being an active participant in the Cognitive and Brain Science and Developmental Science doctoral programs within the Department of Psychology, he is affiliated with three interdisciplinary doctoral programs: Child Language, Clinical Child Psychology and Neuroscience.

His research has been focused on the measurement and evaluation of neurocognitive development in infancy and early childhood, and in recent years he has worked on numerous clinical trials evaluating the effects of nutrients and micronutrients on the development of cognitive function in infants and children. He has published over 120 peer-refereed articles and six books/monographs, has presented his work on five continents, and has generated more than $30 million in external research across his career. His work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, private foundations, and industry. He is past associate editor for the journal Child Development (2007-2013) and past editor of the journal Infancy (2013-2018). He has served on the Developmental and Learning Science panel at the National Science Foundation, and various study sections at the Institute of Education Science and at the National Institutes of Health; he is currently a member of the CCHD Study Section (Eunice Shriver National Institute for Child Health and Human Development). He has placed predoctoral students and postdoctoral trainees in academic positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Arizona, the University of Georgia, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Baylor University, Loyola University (Chicago), Indiana State University, and Eastern Carolina University.