Esther Adi-Japha (PhD, Hebrew University, Israel, 1998) is a Professor of Child Development at the Faculty of Education, Bar-Ilan University. Adi-Japha heads the Child Development Study Program and the Harris Clinical Program for Infants, Toddlers, and their Families. Her study focuses on early childhood, looking at the procedural memory system and its interactions with children’s drawings, language development, math, and creativity in typical and atypical development. Adi-Japha studies early child development and care (ECEC) and wrote the national birth-50 months curriculum in Israel.
The Early Childhood Learning and Development Lab, headed by Prof. Esther Adi-Japha at Bar-Ilan University, is a vibrant hub for research in child development, focusing on (a) skill learning, (b) thinking skills and creativity, and (c) early childhood education and care (ECEC), with a particular emphasis on how children acquire and refine skills, particularly motor skills, in relation to other domains, including language, mathematics, creativity, and ECEC quality. One of the lab’s unique strengths is its integration of longitudinal studies with experimental designs, allowing researchers to track developmental changes over time while also testing targeted interventions. As head of the Child Development Program within the Faculty of Education and a research fellow at the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, Prof. Adi-Japha leads interdisciplinary investigations that bridge neuroscience, education, and developmental psychology.