Magdalena Janus is a Professor at the McMaster University (Canada) Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences and Offord Centre for Child Studies where she holds the Ontario Chair in Early Child Development.
Since joining the Offord Centre for Child Studies at McMaster in 1997, Magdalena, together with the late Dr. Dan Offord, developed the Early Development Instrument (EDI), a measure of children's readiness to learn at school entry. This initiative has generated interest at national and international levels, from academic and social policy perspectives. Magdalena and her team support the implementation of the EDI in Canada, and its adaptation in many international sites, including Australia where its adaptation is known as Australian Early Development Census (AEDC). Magdalena is also an Affiliate Professor at the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia, where she collaborates with the Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP). For the last 15 years, Magdalena's interests also included the development and early experiences of children in their first three years of life. With colleagues at HELP, she has been involved in the research on the Toddler Development Instrument in Canada, and with the WHO on the Global Scales for Early Development (GSED), a new and innovative tool to measure development of very young children globally. She is an active educator, being directly involved in teaching, supervising, or tutoring students, as well as in the development of new curricula, with special relevance to early child development.
