The Refereed Program Committee shall be composed of at least three (3) members. It may be composed of two (2) or more Directors and one (1) or more members of the Corporation. The Vice-President of Information Technology ordinarily sits on this committee as a co-chair. 

The Refereed Program Planning Committee is broadly charged with the process of reviewing submissions to the Annual Meetings. Specific duties involve assembling a set of reviewers, coordinating submissions and distributing them to reviewers, collecting and summarizing reviews, accepting and rejecting proposals based on reviews, communicating acceptance decisions to proposal submitters, and working with the Invited Program Planning Committee to schedule presentation sessions. 

Our committee spends a significant amount of time drafting the call for the annual conference and reviewing the submitted proposals. Our main task is to recruit reviewers, coordinating the distribution of proposals to reviewers, sending acceptance and rejection letters and working with the conference organizers to plan the 3-day event. We collaborate closely with the local organizers to create the program and schedule all the events, from the invited presentations to symposium, paper panels, and poster sessions. We meet on a monthly basis but during the review period we meet on a weekly basis a most of the workload for our committee revolves around reviewing proposals and drafting the program. 

The Membership and Publicity Committee shall be composed of at least three (3) members.  The current Vice-President for Membership and Vice-President of Communications shall act as a Co-Chairs.  

The Membership and Publicity Committee shall aid the Board in its ongoing task of recruiting and maintaining a membership of adequate size and character to secure the health of the Corporation and achieve its interdisciplinary and international goals. The Committee will act to ensure regular communications with the membership, including publicizing Society conferences and activities in appropriate venues, through a variety of media. 

In practice, we recently began to develop an infrastructure to help us deal with rising expectations for a social media presence and for communicating new Board initiatives, including Members’ Profiles (which the Committee generates, as well as communicates), the Podcast Series, and Human Development publications.  These initiatives are in addition to communications regarding the Call for Proposals, Call for Board Nominations, Call for Award Nominations, advertising the annual conference, and various Society updates.  This has included establishing various channels of communication with relevant board committees as well as timelines for posting communications across platforms.  The Committee meets via zoom on an as-needed basis, usually bimonthly, for approximately 1-2 hours, with electronic communications between meetings.  The chair and co-chair meet and communicate more regularly.  It’s difficult to estimate the time commitment, as it likely varies considerably across members depending on what’s going on.  For instance, we get busier around the time of the Call for Proposals and the lead-up to the annual conference.  Similarly, time spent by the subcommittee responsible for generating the Members Profiles waxes and wanes.  I estimate that members spend on average approximately one hour per week on Committee business.

The Awards Committee is charged with determining the winners of three awards given annually  by the JPS: The Doctoral Dissertation Prize; The Early Career Award in Developmental Science; The Distinguished Contributions to Developmental Science Award.  The committee is NOT responsible for the Pufall Travel Award. 

The committee holds meetings (generally online to complete the following tasks: 

1. Initiate the publicity for the awards
2. Determine the strategy for identifying the recipient(s) of the Distinguished Contributions Award
3. Read all materials submitted by the applicants.

For the Early Career and Distinguished Contributions Award this entails reading the letter of nomination/application, along with 2 -3 supporting letters and a CV.For the Early Career and Distinguished Contributions Award this entails reading the letter of nomination/application, along with 2 -3 supporting letters and a CV.

The committee meets to organize its work for the year, then to select the winners of the early career and distinguished contributions award, and to select the 3 finalists for the dissertation prize.   Finally, the committee meets to select the winner of the dissertation prize. Meetings generally last between 30 minutes – one hour.  Reading time spent reviewing applications and dissertation materials can take approximately 20 hours altogether.