Alexandra (Allie) Sullivan, PhD
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alliesullivan.bsky.social
Alexandra (Allie) Sullivan, PhD
@alliesullivan.bsky.social
860 followers 870 following 94 posts
Studying how stress & parenting impact health | Licensed (CA) | Assistant Professor UCSFPsychiatry | Child Clinical Psych PhD UVMPsychology CHSConsortium
dralexandrasullivan.com
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alliesullivan.bsky.social
infants' cortisol is way out of whack, as a rule, until they get to 6-9 months old. meta-analytic bio evidence lining up with parental experience of babies' odd sleep.
to understand pathology in kids, we gotta understand normality.
academic.oup.com/jcem/article...
Kervezee et al., 2025: Figure 3. Model-predicted 24-hour rhythms in salivary cortisol concentrations across different age categories in early infancy. Data points are derived from the two-harmonic cosinor model (back-transformed from the log scale) and shown as estimated marginal means and 95% CI. Figure shows absence in diurnal patterning at 0 months with gradual "normative" diurnal curve emerging across the first year.
March 12, 2025 at 10:46 PM
alliesullivan.bsky.social
Check out the option close(ish) to all of us Bay Area and UCSF researchers!

(I promise crossing the bridge won’t harm you ❤️)

#science
Stand up for science flyer for Sacramento
February 25, 2025 at 3:05 AM
alliesullivan.bsky.social
This ground-breaking, policy-relevant, and bleeding -edge research was funded by European grants, FYI.
screen grab saying: " This work has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant Agreement No. 883069), ‘la Caixa’ Foundation under the project code LCF/PR/HR19/52160001, FEDER/Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación – Agencia Estatal de Investigación (RTI2018-093952-B-I00), Instituto de Salud Carlos III project PI22/01365 and co-funded by European Regional Development Fund. M.M.-G. was funded by Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, Instituto de Salud Carlos III, Predoctorales de Formación en Investigación en Salud (PFIS) (contract FI18/00255) and S.C. was funded by a Miguel Servet Type II research contract (CPII21/00016). M.M.-G. and S.C. were co-funded by European Social Fund ‘Investing in your future’. A.S. was supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (PRE2019–091422)."
February 19, 2025 at 4:37 PM
alliesullivan.bsky.social
Maternal brains are highly plastic. This plasticity is evident in the months after birth. These changes relate to maternal wellbeing and maternal-child attachment. See a recent gorgeous paper.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#BrainScience
#MaternalHealth
#FundScience
Fig 1 from Servin-Barthet et al., 2025, Nat Comm: "Longitudinal changes were derived from the group x session2 fixed effect term of the adjusted linear mixed effect model: Cortical GM Volume ∼ Group + Session + Session2 + Group*Session + Group*Session2 + eTIV + Age + Euler + Inter-session Interval + (1 ∣ participant ID). A Mean percentage of cortical GM volume change per group and session in relation to the baseline (i.e., Session 1 - Pre-pregnancy Session). Error bars correspond to 95% confidence intervals around the sample’s mean at each experimental group and session, respectively. The gray shading corresponds to the pregnancy period. B Vertex-wise signed effect size maps (ηp2) of the group x session2 interaction (q value < 0.05). Indicating larger quadratic effects (red) and smaller quadratic effects (blue) in gestational mothers than in nulliparous or non-gestational mothers. Signed effect size maps were projected to the inflated fsaverage template provided by the FreeSurfer software. Colors were collapsed to ±0.14, which indicated a large effect size. Gest, gestational mothers; nGest, non-gestational mothers; Null, nulliparous women."
February 19, 2025 at 4:35 PM
alliesullivan.bsky.social
I’ll just leave this here.
Perhaps not the best approach for the structures that give us life (and cost!) saving healthcare 🤷🏻‍♀️
Super detailed horse drawing progresses into awful childlike drawing “When your client asks if you can do it cheaper”
February 8, 2025 at 3:12 PM
alliesullivan.bsky.social
I don’t know about y’all, but all this cortisol and adrenaline has me getting PRs left and right. 😅
Strava split times for a bike ride showing PRs
February 6, 2025 at 1:56 AM
alliesullivan.bsky.social
Throw back to when we had access to CDC data. My synthesis from early 2023:
"Female high schoolers, in particular, are struggling: 57% reported persistent feelings of sadness & hopelessness and 30% attempted suicide". These data are so essential.
January 31, 2025 at 6:46 PM
alliesullivan.bsky.social
a REALLY COOL paper showing that mom's stress during HER childhood & during pregnancy have unique signatures on genetic expression markers in the PLACENTA. Biological mechanisms of the intergenerational transmission of stress
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#academicbluesky
January 17, 2025 at 7:44 PM
alliesullivan.bsky.social
Nice meta synthesizing DAD mental health effects on child mental health. TLDR: Paternal mental illness links to more child mental health probs, indicating family-based solutions are necessary for healthy kids.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
January 2, 2025 at 3:16 PM
alliesullivan.bsky.social
Also, check out THIS phenomenal umbrella review on ACEs and multidomain outcomes. Pooled effect sizes are so helpful for developing our lit review. acamh-onlinelibrary-wiley-com.ucsf.idm.oclc.org/doi/10.1111/...
Fig from Kim & Royal 2024 showing comparative effect sizes of ACEs on different health/behavior outcomes.
December 12, 2024 at 6:00 PM
alliesullivan.bsky.social
Reminding everyone of this fabulous 2019 infographic delineating the huge cost of ACEs in North America

Full paper here: www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
December 12, 2024 at 5:49 PM
alliesullivan.bsky.social
🤓
December 12, 2024 at 5:21 PM
alliesullivan.bsky.social
Inspiring grand rounds by Dr. Eraka Bath on making good trouble for collective liberation and health equity
Dr Bath presenting in the pritzker auditorium in front of a slide on good trouble in the context of health justice
December 10, 2024 at 5:16 PM
alliesullivan.bsky.social
Does anyone else deeply rely on focusmate when they write at home or is it just me
Calendar screengrab showing 3 focusmate slots
December 4, 2024 at 5:27 PM
alliesullivan.bsky.social
My trophy 😍
November 16, 2024 at 11:16 PM
alliesullivan.bsky.social
Helpful foundational cite for parenting and maternal health researchers -- new annual review on what's going on when moms are exposed to early-life and pregnancy stress, and how that exposure might impact child health
www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
Fig 1 from Thomason & Hendrix, 2024
November 14, 2024 at 4:58 PM
alliesullivan.bsky.social
Our new study in @psych found parent-child #therapy intervention offsets biological/#health risk for children exposed to #trauma! journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
An infographic depicting a family with a toddler, a DNA strand, and the main findings of a study on child-parent psychotherapy and epigenetic age acceleration. The following tweet thread reports on the study findings.
November 12, 2024 at 1:59 PM
alliesullivan.bsky.social
Everyday is caturday at my house.
Cat sitting on scientist’s shoulders while working at computer.
October 19, 2023 at 2:22 PM
alliesullivan.bsky.social
🚨NEW STUDY Wondering how parenting and childhood adversity shape biological aging? Our findings show that children exposed to adversity exhibited lower epigenetic age acceleration when positive parenting increased! #psychscisky #devpsy #phdsky
October 13, 2023 at 8:33 PM
alliesullivan.bsky.social
Proud to be among the legion of Rex mentees:) Parenting the strong-willed kiddo, new edition out soon! helpful updates with tech parenting.
#DevelopmentalPsychology
#Psychscisky
#AppliedPsych
image of a book cover of "parenting the strong-willed child"
October 6, 2023 at 5:25 PM