USC CANDLE founding director Mary Helen Immordino-Yang has been named a 2026–27 Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), joining a distinguished interdisciplinary community of scholars working to deepen understanding of human behavior and address consequential challenges facing society.
During her fellowship year, Immordino-Yang will advance a new scholarly book that brings together more than two decades of research across neuroscience, psychology and education. The book will explore how adolescents develop the capacity to grapple with the ethical, personal and systems-level complexities of ideas and experience — a form of meaning-making she has termed transcendent thinking— and how this capacity contributes to brain development, wellbeing, creativity, productivity and civic life.
At the heart of the project is an ambitious proposition: that adolescence is not simply a period to be managed or prepared for adulthood, but a consequential developmental window in which young people are actively constructing the beliefs, identities and ways of thinking that will shape who they become and the societies they help create. Drawing across biological and social science, Immordino-Yang will develop what she describes as a new developmental humanism, connecting the science of adolescent development to fundamental questions about education and human flourishing.
“Mary Helen’s work challenges us to rethink some of our most basic assumptions about learning and development,” said Pedro Noguera, the Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops of the USC Rossier School of Education. “Her research demonstrates that young people’s capacity to reflect deeply on themselves, other people and the wider world is central to their development. The opportunity to bring this work into conversation with scholars across disciplines at CASBS is both a tremendous recognition and an exciting next step.”
The fellowship also builds directly on the work Immordino-Yang leads at USC CANDLE, where researchers work in partnership with young people, educators and school communities to understand how developmental science can inform the design of learning environments. CANDLE’s research on transcendent thinking is increasingly informing efforts to help educators create schools and classrooms that cultivate curiosity, reflection, belonging and meaningful intellectual engagement.
“This fellowship recognizes not only an extraordinary body of scholarship, but an idea with profound implications for education,” said Elana Glasenberg, chair of the USC Rossier Board of Councilors. “Mary Helen and the USC CANDLE team are helping us imagine what becomes possible when schools are designed around how young people actually develop, not simply what we want them to know. That is an enormously hopeful proposition for the future of education.”
Immordino-Yang is the Fahmy and 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 (USC CANDLE). Her work aims to improve education and the human condition through developmental science, in collaboration with youth and educators. She was elected to the National Academy of Education in 2023 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2025.
