Melanie Nyhof is an associate professor of psychological science at Carthage College. She earned a PhD in developmental psychology from the University of Pittsburgh and has held positions at Northwestern College, Indiana University South Bend, Fuller School of Graduate Studies, and Oxford University. Her research examines cognition and culture from a developmental perspective. She has researched understanding of illness, afterlife beliefs, rituals, and religion among different religious and cultural groups in the US, Indonesia, China, and Puerto Rico. She has expertise in conducting cross-cultural research with different age groups using multiple methodologies, including interviews, surveys, and ethnographic methods.

As a US Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Nyhof is studying children’s religious and cultural socialization in Tana Toraja in collaboration with faculty at Universitas Kristen Indonesia (UKI) Toraja. Her project focuses on the process of transmission of cultural and religious knowledge and how children of different ages reason about death and the afterlife using that knowledge.