Developmental psychology fundamentally relies on the robust measurement of individual differences - capturing variables at an individual participant level - in order to formulate hypotheses about what children know, how their psychology changes over time, and to characterize the best predictors of their long-term educational, health, and psychological outcomes.

Parallel advances in high-throughput sequencing and high performance computing now allow us to produce a tremendous amount of genome-wide biological data at the genome, epigenome, and transcriptome levels at multiple cellular resolutions. By combining these data, we have an unprecedented opportunity to derive a mechanistic understanding of biological systems and identify causal factors that lead to human disease.