Human life is fundamentally social. Individual and species' success relies on effective social interactions, which occur daily and accumulate across the lifespan. In navigating our social worlds, we perceive and respond to an array of complex inputs: How can we tell if someone is upset with us? Do we follow advice from a friend? Whom should we approach in a new social context? My interdisciplinary research combines expertise in developmental psychology, education, cognitive science, and social behavior. In my quantitative work, I develop dynamic multi-method experiments, employ rigorous analytic techniques, and investigate individual differences to capture and characterize social behavior as it unfolds. In more recent translational work, I draw connections between policy and learning ecosystems to better understand how to create structures and systems that empower students’ social, emotional, and academic learning. My long-term goal is advance research at the nexus of affective and cognitive development to transform knowledge about social and emotional learning.