Alumni of the Month: Annette Arlander and Kirby Deater-Deckard

I am currently affiliated as a visiting researcher at Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki – although technically retired – and still working with trees, just as I did during my year at the Collegium. Today I am often talking to them (see the podcast ).

I was a postdoctoral artistic researcher at the Collegium in 2017 – paradoxically almost twenty years after defending my doctorate in 1998. Before joining the HCAS I served as a professor at Stockholms Konstnärliga Högskola and helped the institution acquire the right to grant artistic doctoral degrees. At the same time, I supported their staff in applying for research grants from the committee for artistic research at Vetenskapsrådet, the Swedish Research Council. I decided to apply myself, too, with a project called Performing with Plants. Once I had realized what I wanted to explore, I thought of the Collegium as a plan B. And as sometimes happens, I had the good fortune of receiving both grants. Thus, I began the project at the Collegium in 2017 and continued it in Stockholm in 2018–2019. 

This was the first time in my career that I could do research full time, and it felt luxurious. I remember regularly visiting some in Helsinki, as well as in Stockholm, and performing with them for a video camera. In the post I describe my other experiments. The whole project is documented on the Research Catalogue as a , which begins with the original applications and ends with a page of outputs – . Later I have focused on trees rather than plants, but in some sense it all began at HCAS. 

I am Professor of and Director of the at the (USA). 

My interdisciplinary collaborative work uses quantitative methods to examine individual differences in development from birth to mid-life. Currently, I focus on “self-regulation” – how we develop skills and capacities, from biological processes up to complex cognitions and social behaviors, for controlling our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors in response to stressors. This issue is examined in the context of family, neighborhood, school, and in various cultural settings. 

During my fellowship at the HCAS, I collaborated with the study team at the University of Turku, who have been following several thousand children and their parents since the mothers’ pregnancies. My work with FinnBrain also was supported by a . We conducted statistical modeling of longitudinal data on parenting and the parents’ and children’s self-regulation, with a particular emphasis on cognitive executive functioning involving modulation of attention, memory, and impulses. We have published a number of journal articles, and the collaboration continues. 

Through FinnBrain, I became connected to the multi-university in Finland and am now a consultant working with those teams on similar lines of research. This led to a and a Visiting Professorship in Social Sciences at the University of Turku.

My time at the HCAS was the highlight of my scholarly career and life. The group of scholars in my cohort, our debates and discussions in the weekly Fellows’ seminar and the Common Room of the Collegium, the exposure to brilliant ideas from a wide array of disciplines – all of these converged in ways I could never have anticipated. The special events, lectures, and workshops motivated me and provided new ideas. The culmination of these experience was an HCAS (November 2025) that I helped organize and lead. I have lasting friendships and a love for the HCAS, Helsinki, and Finland that I will cherish for the rest of my life.