Northeastern University professor honored with prestigious American Psychological Association award
Laurel Gabard-Durnam, whose work focuses on brain plasticity and creating real-world tools, will receive the Boyd McCandless Award in August, 2026.
Laurel Gabard-Durnam wants to understand how the brain adapts to new experiences, but she also wants to use that understanding to “do good in the world,” she says.
Her research has focused on the development of the young brain and its malleability, as well as creating practical applications for public health and clinical interventions.
Now, Gabard-Durnam, an assistant professor of psychology at Northeastern University, is the 2026 awardee of the Boyd McCandless Award from the American Psychological Association. The award honors early-career scientists for making significant contributions to the field of developmental psychology. Gabard-Durnam’s contributions include an open-source electroencephalography program and a deeper understanding of brain plasticity in humans.
A malleable start
Gabard-Durnam’s career has always been about trying new things. She recalls taking a class “sort of by chance” on how experience changes the brain, also called brain plasticity. Later, she would email, out of the blue, some of the researchers whose material she encountered in that course, who would go on to become her mentors.
She was drawn to the concept of plasticity from the beginning. It was then and remains a subject we don’t know enough about, she says, and she saw an opportunity for real applications in the world, tools that could be used with babies and young children in both research and clinical contexts.
Rebecca Shansky, professor and chair of Northeastern’s psychology department, says that Gabard-Durnam’s work on brain plasticity “has led not just to novel insights into how experiences can shape the neural signatures of cognitive function in children, but also to computational tools” now used by researchers worldwide.
One of the tools that has come out of Gabard-Durnam’s Plasticity in Neurodevelopment Lab is an open-source software designed to make EEGs — electroencephalography, which records the electric signals of the brain — more accessible to researchers of all skill levels.
EEGs produce “an incredibly information-rich signal,” she says, which hasn’t yet been fully tapped for all the information it can provide. The coding required to extract those metrics, however, can be esoteric. She says that she has seen her software “facilitate research programs at underserved institutions, or places that couldn’t normally host those kinds of research programs” without a significant investment in more staff.
The team in her lab also hopes to develop tools geared toward teaching middle and high schoolers, to help young people learn about the brain and get involved in research early.
Context switching
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Gabard-Durnam has long situated her work at the intersection of two formal approaches, she says, software and other tools on one side, and thinking through methodologically difficult concepts on the other.
Her current research tackles questions around neural inhibition. “How does having the ability to suppress brain activity translate into being able to learn and take up information?” she asks.
For instance, recent research conducted by Gabard-Durnam and her team discovered that infants who were exposed to general anesthesia learned faster than their non-exposed counterparts.
Gabard-Durnam gets more and more excited when she talks about all the questions that are left to answer in her field. Why one experience had an impact on brain development while another didn’t is one of the largest open questions. “Is it how predictable an input is? Is it how frequently you experience it within a certain window of time? Is it something about the valence attached to it?” she asks by way of example.
“How do we even quantify some of the more complex experiences that we have as humans?” she continues.
Honoring a legacy
The “Boyd McCandless Award is given to scientists who have made truly transformative contributions to their field early in their careers,” Shansky says. “Laurel unquestionably belongs in this elite group of game changers.”
Gabard-Durnam says that Boyd McCandless, the namesake for the award she’ll accept from the American Psychological Association annual convention in August, was a prolific and innovative scientist whose reputation has outlived him. McCandless passed away in 1975 at the age of 60.
Though she never met McCandless, Gabard-Durnam notes that the scientific community remembers his excellence as both a scientist and a mentor, which only increases the honor she feels in receiving the award. “He was the sort of scientist who lifted those around him,” she says.
