Magdalena Janus

Magdalena Janus has a Ph.D. in behavioural sciences from Cambridge University and is a professor at the Department of Pediatrics at the University of British Columbia and the Sunny Hill BC Leadership Chair in Child Development. She also holds an appointment at the Human Learning Partnership, School of Population and Public Health, UBC and is a part-time professor at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences and the Offord Centre for Child Studies at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Canada. She is a co-author, with the late Dr. Dan Offord, of the Early Development Instrument (EDI), a measure of children's developmental health at school entry. Dr. Janus and her team led the implementation of the EDI in Canada, which now surpassed 1 million children and is a widely-used source of population-level data on early child development. The EDI has been adapted for use in a number of countries. Dr. Janus regularly works with organizations such as the World Bank, WHO, UNICEF, and UNESCO on the measurement and indicators of early child development; most recently on the Global Scales of Early Development (GSED) project. Her research interests include early development of children with and without developmental challenges, social determinants of children’s health, and indicators of child development.