our team
Lab Members, Spring 2024
From left to right: Dr. Sabrina Thurman, Kenan Carter, and Parker Fairfield.
Lab Director
Dr. Sabrina Thurman
Dr. Sabrina Thurman (B.A., University of North Carolina at Greensboro; M.A., University of Tennessee; Ph.D., University of Tennessee) is an Associate Professor in the Psychology Department at Elon University and Director of the Infant Development Lab. She studies how infants acquire new motor skills, postures, and forms of locomotion, and how infants learn to use their bodies for manipulation and exploration of their environments. She is interested in the role of caregivers in those processes. She also studies the development of reaching, intermanual coordination, and hand preference.
Sabrina’s research has been published in professional academic journals such as Child Development and Developmental Psychology. She has presented her research at multiple professional conferences, including the Society for Research in Child Development and the International Congress of Infant Studies. In her leisure time, Sabrina enjoys gardening and planning her next landscaping/home improvement projects.
Undergraduate Research Students
Parker Fairfield ('24)
Parker is a Psychology major with a double minor in Teaching and Learning and Poverty and Social Justice Studies, and is also an Elon College Fellow. She is interested in the impacts of mother-child and father-child interactions, separately, on infant motor development, and also hopes to learn more about the effects of parental beliefs and practices on infant motor development within the U.S. In her free time, Parker enjoys experimenting with cooking, learning how to do nails for herself and her friends, and working as a tutor in a local elementary school.
Kenan Carter ('25)
Kenan is a Psychology major with a minor in Exercise Science. She is interested in the motor development of infants with motor impairments and delays. She hopes to further explore the connections between cognitive processes and motor skill stages in infants. In her free time, Kenan enjoys playing tennis, going to Elon’s local yoga studio, and spending time with friends.