Ph.D. – all concentrations
Fall Enrollment - Dec. 1
M.S. Plan A (research track) in Child Development or Human Development and Family Studies
Fall Enrollment - Dec. 1
M.S. Plan B (professional track) in Child Development or Human Development and Family Studies
Fall & Summer Enrollment - Feb. 1
Spring Enrollment - Oct. 1
Online Master’s Degrees and Graduate Certificates
Spring Enrollment - Oct. 1
Summer Enrollment -February 1
Fall Enrollment -June 1
Applying to a graduate program in HDFS is a two-step process:
Please choose at least one faculty member from the lists below, listed by subfields Child Development, Couple and Family Therapy, and Diversity, Youth and Family Development. Click each faculty member's name to learn more about their background and research.
Dr. Ryan Bowles in an associate professor whose research studies early childhood language and literacy development.
Dr. Holly Brophy-Herb is a professor whose interested in how infants and toddlers come to understand their own and others’ emotions and influences on their experiences. Such influences include studying parent/educator well-being and supports for well-being, as well as processes such as parent/educator reflective capacities and mentalization processes, beliefs about emotions, and responses to expressions of emotions.
Dr. Sarah Douglas is an associate professor whose research focuses on three distinct areas: paraeducator supports for students with disabilities, communication partner training to support children who use augmentative and alternative communication, and sensor technologies to measure social interactions of children with disabilities.
Dr. Amy Nuttall is an associate professor whose research broadly focuses on processes of resilience and risk in the context of family stress with the broader goal of translating research into effective interventions.
Dr. Lori Skibbe is a professor who researches individual differences in the development of early language and literacy skills for children, including those with disabilities.
Dr. Claire Vallotton is a professor whose research interests are the early development and integration of cognitive-linguistic and social-emotional skills within the context of caregiver-child relationships, family risks, and culture.
Dr. Adrian Blow, Professor, conducts research on issues related to families and trauma. His most recent work is focused on military families, change processes in family therapy, and couple resiliency processes.
Dr. Ahnalee Brincks, Associate Professor, is a public health scientist whose research is situated at the intersection of prevention science and advanced statistical methods. She focuses on optimizing interventions by uncovering how, and for whom, interventions are most effective. She is an expert in adaptive interventions and the study designs used to develop them.
Dr. Lekie Dwanyen, Assistant Professor, studies the relational effects of traumatic stress and mass trauma exposure. She is interested in the development of family-level traumatic stress interventions for communities internally or externally displaced from war and political violence.
Dr. Kendal Holtrop, Associate Professor and Couple and Family Therapy Ph.D. Program Director, maintains a program of research focused on parenting and parenting interventions. Her research activities include adapting and implementing evidence-based interventions in community settings as well as examining parenting practices and family processes to inform intervention work.
Dr. Chi-Fang Tseng, Assistant Professor, studies mental health outcomes among marginalized populations. Her research focuses on culturally adapted evidence-based couple interventions, with particular attention to couples with marginalized identities. Her goal is to provide tailored and effective interventions to reduce mental health disparities.
Dr. Andrea Wittenborn, HDFS Chair and Professor, studies the process and outcomes of interventions for depression, including methods for personalizing treatment. Her research targets interpersonal mechanisms of depression with the goal of decreasing depressive symptoms and enhancing close relationships.
Dr. Linda Halgunseth is an associate professor whose research focuses on parenting and children’s health and well-being in African, European, and Latin American families.
Dr. Deborah Johnson is a professor whose research explores racially and culturally related development, parental racial socialization and coping, cultural adjustment from early childhood through emerging adulthood, in both domestic and international children and youth.
Dr. Megan Maas is an assistant professor in Human Development & Family Studies. Her work sits at the intersection of sexual violence prevention and sexual health promotion.
Dr, Desiree Qin is a professor whose research focuses on highlighting nuanced, complex family processes that have been overlooked in quantitative work on Asian immigrant families, especially struggle in parent-child relations, e.g., emotional alienation, parent-child conflicts, communication challenges and negative impact of tiger parenting.
Dr. Emilie Smith is a professor whose community-engaged research seeks to understand the ways in which families, schools, and communities interact to affect positive youth development, and particularly, racial-ethnic identity and socialization among those of diverse socio-economic and geographic backgrounds.
Dr. Francisco Villarruel is a professor whose research seeks to contribute to a fair and equal justice program for youth. He has also been involved in research that focuses on youth development and what communities can do to foster the development transitions of youth to adulthood.
Dr. Yijie Wang is an associate professor whose research interests center on the development of adolescents, particularly those from racial and ethnic minority families. Her work investigates how socio-cultural processes (e.g., ethnic/racial socialization, discrimination) in multiple developmental settings (e.g., family, peer, school, neighborhood) influence youth’s psychosocial and psychobiological adjustment.
If you have any problems uploading documents to the application form or this site, please email Phillip Reid reidphil@msu.edu
Once an application is complete, each application will be reviewed using the following criteria:
For questions or additional information about the application or admissions process, please contact Mr. Phil Reid (reidphil@msu.edu). For substantive questions about the graduate programs or the applications, please contact: