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Biography
Jelena is a professor at Stanford University in the Developmental and Psychological Sciences program at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. She completed a Ph.D. in developmental psychology at the Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota, and postdoctoral training in psychophysiology at the University of British Columbia. She is the recipient of a Jacobs Foundation Advanced Research Fellowship, a William T. Grant Foundation Scholar Award, and Early Career Research Contribution Award from the Society for Research in Child Development. Jelena’s research examines how the interplay of children’s physiological stress arousal, self-regulatory skills, and quality of caregiving environments contributes to their health, learning, and well-being over time. She also studies how caregivers’ executive functions and emotion regulation skills contribute to teaching and parenting practices that promote or undermine child development. Her current work involves the development of novel, pragmatic, scalable assessments of executive functions, emotion regulation, and motivation.
Other titles
Professor, Graduate School of Education
Member, Bio-X
Program affiliations
DAPS
(MS) EDS
Research interests
Assessment, Testing and Measurement | Brain and Learning Sciences | Child Development | Early Childhood | Equity in Education | Motivation | Parents and Family Issues | Poverty and Inequality | Psychology | Social and Emotional Learning
Recent publications
Draper, C. E., Yousafzai, A. K., McCoy, D. C., Cuartas, J., Obradović, J., Bhopal, S., … Okely, A. D. (2024). The next 1000 days: building on early investments for the health and development of young children. Lancet (London, England).
Finch, J. E., Garcia, E. B., & Obradovic, J. (2024). Back to school: Teachers' initial perceptions of students' executive function behaviors are important for teacher-student relationships and executive function development. APPLIED DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE.
Lopera-Perez, D. C., Obradović, J., Yousafzai, A. K., Keehn, B., Siyal, S., Nelson, C. A., & Tarullo, A. R. (2024). Early Family Experiences and Neural Activity in Rural Pakistani Children: The Differential Role of Gender. Developmental Psychobiology, 66(6), e22534.