Stephanie M. Carlson is an associate professor of developmental psychology at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development and a member of the faculty of Minnesota’s Center for Neurobehavioral Development. Her research focuses on self-control (executive function) in childhood and self-regulatory processes in cognitive and social development as well as social cognition, including theory of mind, and symbol systems, particularly pretend play and language. She is a graduate of Bucknell University and of the University of Oregon, where she took a Ph.D. in psychology in 1997. After completing a post-doctoral fellowship in cognitive neuroscience at Oregon, Dr. Carlson was appointed an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Washington in 1998. She was promoted to associate professor in 2005 and accepted her present position at Minnesota two years later. Her research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health as well as the universities of Oregon and Washington. A member of Sigma Xi, Dr. Carlson is the recipient of a University of Washington Junior Faculty Development Award. She currently serves on the board of the Jean Piaget Society. A member of the editorial board of Developmental Psychology, she previously served as consulting editor to Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development. She is the author or co-author of some thirty articles published in academic journals and is currently working (with Philip D. Zelazo and Ulrich Mueller) on a book, Self-Control and the Developing Brain, which will be published by Psychology Press/LEA, Taylor & Francis.