Iowa Child Welfare Research Station

German-American psychologist Kurt Zadek Lewin worked there and Robert Richardson Sears directed the station for much of the 1940s.

A leader of the Iowa Congress of Mothers (a chapter of the National Congress of Mothers, which later became the Parent-Teacher Association) named Cora Bussey Hillis arranged for the station to be sited at the University of Iowa and procured funding from the state legislature and the Women's Christian Temperance Union.

[1] Hillis worked with Carl Emil Seashore, then the head of the psychology department at the University of Iowa, to establish the station.

That the state board of education is hereby authorized to establish and maintain at Iowa City as an integral part of the State University, the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station, having as its objects the investigation of the best scientific methods of conserving and developing the normal child, the dissemination of the information acquired by such investigation, and the training of students for work in such fields.

With the exception of a stint of military service during World War I Dr. Bird Thomas Baldwin served as the first director of the station until his death on May 11, 1928.