Lucia Santos earned her PhD from the University of São Paulo investigating how cultural practices of touch shape early infant attachment patterns. She spent four years as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute, extending her research to North American and South American cohorts and developing novel measures of caregiver-infant synchrony. Her work bridged developmental science and cultural psychology, yielding six journal publications and one book chapter. She collaborated closely with developmental psychologists across three continents, strengthening the Institute's international networks. Santos left in 2012 to join the faculty at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro as an assistant professor.