Dr. Chris Kurby grew up in Elmhurst, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. As a kid, he explored the gamut of junior sports leagues—soccer, baseball, wrestling, gaming—but it wasn’t until adulthood that he found his athletic passion. (More on that later.) He also got hooked on music; he learned to play the drums, marched in the band, and played in rock bands.

Chris imprinted on psychology as an undergraduate at Northern Illinois University. His first impulse was neuroscience; however, the faculty member he approached had a full lab. After talking with Chris about his interests, the neuroscience professor recommended he approach a cognitive psychologist, Joe Magliano. The two hit it off. Chris dove deep into the lab, studying text comprehension and memory, and stayed to complete his PhD with Magliano and Katja Wiemer. During this period, Chris initiated two lines of research, one on integration mechanisms in reading with a particular eye to education contexts, and the other on embodied mechanisms of comprehension.

After a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Memphis with Danielle McNamara, Chris joined us here as a postdoctoral fellow in the Aging & Development training program for three years (2007-2010). Chris’s research during that period extended his investigation of embodied language understanding and explored age-related differences in narrative comprehension. In both lines of research, Chris’s work has been characterized by the development of creative narrative stimuli and the deployment of elegant experimental designs. At WashU, he added functional neuroimaging to his quiver of research tools and dynamic movies to his repertoire of stimuli.

From WashU, Chris moved to beautiful Western Michigan to join the faculty at Grand Valley State University. Grand Valley is in Allendale, west of Grand Rapids, near the dunes of Lake Michigan. The Grand Rapids area is home to a rich arts scene and vibrant craft brewing community.

At Grand Valley, Chris rose through the ranks to become a full professor, earning the university’s Distinguished Early-Career Scholar Award along the way. In 2025, he assumed the role of Department Chair. Chris has been instrumental in building strength in lifespan development while building a creative, impactful program of research. Current projects include research on how film editing affects comprehension across the lifespan and how language proficiency affects working memory updating. A striking feature of Chris’s research program is that he continues to collaborate with colleagues from each stage in his career, from junior colleagues whom he has mentored in his department back to collaborators from his undergraduate days. This network of scientific relationships is a testament to his scientific reasoning and also to his skill in bringing people together in a team.

While building his research program and his department, Chris has managed to find time to be a great dad to his two kids (Scout, 14, and Sebastian, 12), and also to explore old and new interests outside of work. He still plays drums in bands, and recently taught himself to play a bit of guitar. He also found his true love of sports: curling. A leader on the ice as well as in the department, Chris is the manager of the Tuesday night Blackjack league (applications welcome!).

Chris says he enjoys that challenge of chairing his department and the opportunities to think strategically about the direction of his unit and the field. However, he also sees up close the challenges of the current moment for universities and for scientific research. The department has 1000 majors, the most in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, but has only one masters program and no PhD program, which offers unique opportunities to collaborate without the constraints of training graduate students in a set of specialty areas.

Chris is bullish on the future of behavioral science—particularly the application of psychological science to improving education. He is looking forward to continuing to build this future for his university and more broadly for the field. Talking with Chris about research, and about his experience here at WashU, it is easy to catch his enthusiasm!