Bio

I am a developmental scientist, and my research focuses on how early adverse contexts (e.g., poverty; living in neighborhoods with high levels of violence; child maltreatment) impact brain and behavioral development. Through my research, I seek to contribute to a more detailed understanding of how such adversities put individuals at risk for a myriad of deleterious outcomes across development, using structural and functional MRI, as well as different task-based probes of “neurocognitive functioning”. In early work, I focused on how adversity influenced corticolimbic neural circuitry relevant for socio-emotional functioning (i.e., hippocampus; amygdala). More recently, my team and I have focused on how early adverse contexts impact the functioning of the corticostriatal circuit, a collection of brain regions centrally involved with reward responsiveness and learning. In these different investigations, we have examined socioeconomic variables, such as family/household income and parental education.