The Cecil J. Picard Center for Child Development and Lifelong Learning is a leading university-level research center that produces rigorous, innovative, and actionable knowledge in order to ensure that all children get a strong start and continuous support for excelling in school and life.

The Picard Center’s current research portfolio emphasizes two broad substantive areas: (a) early childhood education from birth to school entry, with holistic consideration of children’s cognitive, behavioral, mental, social, and physical health and the systems that support them, and, (b) healthy lifespan development, from infancy through young adulthood, synergistically considering transdisciplinary perspectives in areas such as mental and behavioral health, positive youth development, school counseling, and clinical and community psychology. The Picard Center also serves as a research incubator for faculty and students across the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in these two substantive focal areas and related social/behavioral, educational, and health sciences topics.

In its methodological approaches, the Center emphasizes efforts to ensure public dollars are invested in ways that are fair and sustainable, including through supporting researcher-practitioner-policymaker partnerships, using leading-edge open data science strategies, and ensuring modern testing theory and data visualization techniques are accessible to non-experts.