John Colombo

John Colombo, Ph.D. is a Professor and Director of the Life Span Institute at the University of Kansas, where he has been a member of the Department of Psychology since January 2002, after joining the faculty of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in 1988. His research spans multiple laboratories including those at the KU Edwards Campus, KU Medical Center, and the Wakarusa Research Facility in Lawrence. Dr. Colombo is affiliated with several research centers including the Cognitive & Brain Sciences program, the Developmental Psychology Program, the Life Span Institute, and the Biobehavioral Neurosciences in Communication Disorders program.

Dr. Colombo received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1981. Following a year at Youngstown State University (1981-1982) and six years as a research associate with the Bureau of Child Research at the University of Kansas (1982-1988), he joined the KU faculty. His extensive publication record demonstrates a career-long focus on developmental cognitive neuroscience with particular emphasis on attention and learning processes in infancy and early childhood.

His primary research interests include developmental cognitive neuroscience of attention and learning, with a special focus on early individual differences and how they relate to typical and atypical development of cognitive and intellectual function. His work integrates nutrition and cognitive development, developmental origins of health and disease, autonomic function and behavior, developmental systems theory, and developmental research design and quantitative methods. He has published extensively on the relationship between docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) supplementation and cognitive development.

Dr. Colombo's research portfolio demonstrates a clear progression from foundational work on infant visual attention and cognitive processing to more recent investigations of nutritional influences on neurodevelopment. His recent publications focus on long-term outcomes of early nutritional interventions, particularly regarding DHA supplementation during pregnancy and infancy, and their effects on cognitive, behavioral, and physiological outcomes through childhood.

He has received numerous research grants from the National Institutes of Health (including multiple R01, R21, and P30 grants), Mead Johnson Nutrition, and other funding agencies. His work has been particularly focused on the Kansas DHA Outcomes Study (KUDOS) and other clinical trials examining the effects of nutritional interventions on developmental outcomes.

Dr. Colombo has been instrumental in establishing research infrastructure at the University of Kansas, including serving as Principal Investigator on the Kansas Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center grant. He has mentored numerous students and collaborators, and his work has been widely published in top-tier journals in developmental psychology, nutrition, and neuroscience.