Langbourne Rust is a child psychologist and consumer researcher who has devoted his career to bringing producers closer to children, driven by the conviction that the better people understand children, the better they will serve them and the more successful they will be. 

A leader in the children's marketing research industry and a frequent speaker at professional conferences, he has written many papers in the professional press about children, research methods and consumer perception.   

He graduated from Harvard College and got a doctorate from Teachers College/Columbia University where he studied child development, cognition and psychological measurement.   He did his post-doctoral work at Children's Television Workshop.  His studies of children's attention to TV material were instituted as creative guidelines for Sesame Street and the Electric Company.    Langbourne Rust Research, Inc. was founded at that time and since then has assisted many of the country's major broadcasters and marketers develop new products and entertainment for children.

Lang was Associate Producer of NBC's children's series, GO-USA. For many years he consulted with CAPTAIN KANGAROO and the children's and tween advertising of McDonald's.

Much of his work in recent years has been concerned with child health, socialization, and development issues and with developing new research technologies.  He conducted a large-scale field experiment for Sesame Workshop to assess the impact of viewing DRAGON TALES upon preschoolers' tendencies to set goals for themselves and to persist at tasks in everyday life.  He did market segment profiling and qualitative interviewing for the US Forest Service's launching of the Junior Forest Ranger Program (with Smoky Bear). He performed website usage and perception study among populations of children, teens and parents for the Nemours Foundation's KidsHealth.org website (the most-visited site on the web for children's health issues). 

Dr. Rust is on the Children's Research Council of the Advertising Research Foundation and has chaired their committee on developmental psychology.  He has been actively involved in drug and tobacco prevention work with Columbia University’s School of Public Health and the University of Vermont's Office of Health Promotion. 

Lang at play: alone, with Susanne, with trout:

We work closely with a small number of highly-skilled professionals, each of whom brings a unique expertise to our projects on an as-needed basis, Foremost among them is Dr. Frances Rust

Currently a visiting professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, she is on leave from the Erikson Institute where she was senior vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty . She is Professor Emeritus at New York University where she was professor of education from 1991 to 2007. Frances began collaborating with Lang professionally in 1969 when they co-directed the Infant and Toddler Learning Lab at Briarcliff College. First trained as a Montessori teacher, Frances founded and ran a number of very successful open-classroom preschools before going back to graduate work at Columbia University's Teachers College - where her doctoral thesis was awarded the Outstanding Dissertation of the Year Award by the American Educational Research Association. In 1998, Teachers College awarded her the Distinguished Alumnae Award for her research and leadership in the field of teacher education. 

When interview projects and seminars call for special knowledge and ability to work with preschool or toddler-aged children, we often turn to Frances.   Clients whom the Drs. Rust have served together include Griffin-Bacal (on Hasbro dolls), Kimberly Clark (on Pull-Ups), Walt Disney Records (on book & tape products for preschoolers),  and General Mills (on preschooler play patterns).