Tiffany Yip is a developmental and community psychologist and a Professor of Psychology at Fordham University, where she has been a faculty member since 2005. She holds a B.A. from Cornell University, M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University, and completed postdoctoral training in Social and Personality Psychology at the University of Michigan.
Her research examines ethnic and racial identity development, discrimination, sleep health disparities, and stress physiology among adolescents and young adults. She has published over 140 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and is currently editing The Cambridge Handbook of Ethnic and Racial Discrimination and Youth Development.
Dr. Yip is an elected fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research. Her honors include the Outstanding Mentor Award from the Society for Research on Adolescence (2023), and the Outstanding Contribution to Research on Asian/Asian Americans Award from the Society for Research in Child Development (2021).
Her research has been funded by NIH and NSF. She currently chairs the NIH MESH (Mechanisms of Emotion, Stress, and Health) Study Section. Her work has been covered by the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, NPR, CNN, and Scientific American.
Why did you decide to choose developmental science as a course of study or career?
A: My path to developmental science was shaped, in part, by growing up with siblings who are nine and thirteen years younger than me. That age gap meant I spent much of my adolescence watching childhood unfold; observing how my sister and brother made sense of themselves, their relationships, and their place in the world at very different points in their development.
Those experiences gave me early insight that development is not simply biological change, but something actively shaped by context, relationships, and environment. I found myself drawn to questions about what drives those differences — why children in the same family, the same neighborhood, the same school can have such distinct developmental trajectories.
That curiosity carried me into developmental science and toward questions that have anchored my research ever since: how do young people, particularly those from racially and ethnically minoritized backgrounds, come to understand who they are, and what are the costs when that process is shaped by discrimination? My work on ethnic and racial identity, sleep health disparities, and stress physiology is rooted in an interest in the conditions that either support or undermine healthy development.
As a parent, that interest continues to evolve. Watching my own children navigate identity, peer relationships, and an increasingly complex and difficult social world makes the research professional and also deeply personal.
What advice would you give to a student beginning their Ph.D. studies in developmental science or related?
A: A mentor once told me to never self-select out of opportunities. I still live by this advice and continue to share it with my own mentees.
Outside of developmental science, what hobbies or activities do you engage in or enjoy?
A: I love food!!!! One of my hobbies is to cook. I would love to go to culinary school one day.
Are there any publications or books would you recommend for development science (and why)?
A: I would love to take this opportunity to mention The Cambridge Handbook of Ethnic/Racial Discrimination and Youth Development, which I am currently editing for Cambridge University Press. The volume brings together an incredible group of scholars, many of them longtime SRCD members and leaders in the field, to synthesize what we know about how discrimination shapes development across childhood and adolescence.
Research and theory on discrimination and youth development has grown enormously over the past few decades, and across developmental science, psychology, social epidemiology, education, and public health, scholars have documented robust and consistent effects of discrimination stress on young people, their peers, and their families. The handbook is designed to bring that work together in one place, tracing foundational theories, empirical findings, and multilevel methods, through to interventions and implications for policy and practice.