Professor Décarie was internationally known for her research on infant development and has been a leader in the establishment of the field of developmental psychology in Canada. Professor Gouin Décarie was trained as a researcher and practitioner in Montréal, Boston, and Paris. Her early career path typified that of many women in that she was simultaneously teaching at the Université de Montréal, raising four children, and pursuing her doctoral studies. Her doctoral thesis, published in English in 1965 (Intelligence and affectivity in young children) with a preface by Piaget, was a brilliant synthesis of Piagetian and Freudian theories. She is also known for her work on the mental and emotional development of children who were victims of thalidomide in 1963.

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Sue Taylor Parker passed away from Parkinson’s disease at the age of 85 on August 26, 2023. Sue was a Biological Anthropologist who taught at Sonoma State University in Northern California until she retired in 2002 as Full Professor Emeritus. She was a notable scholar of comparative cognitive development and gained international recognition for her extensive theoretical publications in the field of comparative developmental evolutionary psychology. Sue was a superb thinker, a rigorous scholar, and a prolific writer, publishing articles, chapters, books, and co-edited research volumes often based on symposia and conferences she co-organized that today provide some of the best references on the development of cognitive abilities in non-human primates.

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Dr. Christopher Edward Lalonde – also known as “Chris the Pro”, “Mondo”, “Dad”, “The Funkle”, and most recently “Pépère” – was born on Sept. 7, 1959 in St. Catharines, Ontario. He died on Monday, May 8, 2023 in Victoria, British Columbia, of complications of liver disease, at age 63. Dr. Lalonde was an internationally recognized scientist based in the psychology department at the University of Victoria, whose research focused on the role of culture in reducing suicide risk among Indigenous youth. Dr. Lalonde’s innovative research focused on how and why some First Nations communities had no suicides in decades, while others had disturbingly high rates. The key, his research posited, was Indigenous communities having control over their political and cultural lives.

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Leslie Smith, Professor Emeritus of Educational Research at Lancaster University, passed away on December 29, 2020 from the effects of myeloma and Parkinson’s disease at the age of 77. His career as a distinguished scholar of Piaget’s work emphasized the intersections among philosophy, history, logic, education, and developmental psychology that JPS was created to explore. Les began his academic career with BA degrees in French, Latin and History of Philosophy at University of London, and a First-class BA in Philosophy at King’s College. He has said that from the very beginning, he was interested in the problem of Necessary Knowledge—how we move from a priori knowledge to the deduction of necessary truths.

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Dr. Jeanette McCarthy Gallagher, Emerita Professor of Educational Psychology at Temple University, died at her home in Doylestown, PA on June 20 at the age of 88. As was noted in the ceremony awarding her with JPS’s Lifetime Achievement Award at our recent 50th Anniversary Meeting, Jeanette was one of the group of women and men at Temple who conceived the idea for The Jean Piaget Society in 1970, organized a meeting in May of that year, and planned for the very successful visit of Piaget and Inhelder to Temple in 1971. Her paper analyzing Piaget’s talk stemmed from that meeting, and was one of the earliest in-depth examinations of the concept of equilibration in English.

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