Sy-Miin Chow is a Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at Pennsylvania State University and Director of the Quantitative Developmental Systems Methodology Core (Quantdev). She leads the Emotions and Dynamic Systems Lab, focusing on developing dynamical systems models to study emotion regulation and longitudinal data analysis in social sciences. Her work integrates Kalman filters, state-space models, and machine learning to understand complex behavioral processes. Dr. Chow holds a Ph.D. in Quantitative Psychology from the University of Virginia. Her research spans emotion dynamics, family systems, and health interventions, with recent emphasis on applying nonlinear methods to real-world datasets from ecological momentary assessments and wearable sensors. Key research interests include: dynamical systems modeling, emotion regulation mechanisms, intensive longitudinal data methods, and bridging computational theory with applied behavioral science. She has contributed novel frameworks for subgrouping heterogeneous time series and handling missingness in multilevel studies. Her methodological innovations have been applied to diverse topics such as adolescent social media use, maternal-infant interaction dynamics, and obesity intervention design. Current projects include advancing adaptive control systems for health applications and developing open-source tools for spatial data analysis from GPS tracking. Dr. Chow's work is supported by NIH grants and institutional funding through Penn State's Social Science Research Institute. She actively collaborates on large-scale initiatives like the Inner Lives of Healthy Babies Network (ILHBN), addressing challenges in harmonizing heterogeneous developmental datasets.
