It has been a great few years of collaborative science and I am so excited to continue this research with all of my amazing colleagues at UGA and beyond!

My current and future research focuses on an important individual difference related to how sensitive children and youth are to their environments: neuroplasticity. With @ashley-n-nielsen.bsky.social, I reviewed measures of human plasticity and translational implications:

tinyurl.com/3ssrbk38

…and that positive postnatal environments in the first years of life can contribute to improved cognitive psychosocial, and brain development outcomes at age 3 years and beyond.

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

…and that maternal prenatal environments impact risk for internalizing at age 12 months, an effect mediated by amygdala and hippocampus – precentral gyrus functional connectivity…

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38386382/

I have also worked with the amazing Early Life Adversity and Biological Embedding sample at Wash U, extending my work to the infant period. We have shown similar moderating effects of the environment on the link between prenatal maternal cortisol and infant amygdala volumes…

tinyurl.com/mr3wk9ct

These results, and other previous work, suggest that the effectiveness of risk markers for psychopathology vary as a function of environmental experiences, an important consideration for future research, as I wrote about here:

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Using data from the ABCD study, and improved dimensional scores of environmental experiences courtesy of @meriahdejoseph.bsky.social, we replicated and extended previous findings linking hippocampus volume to depression, but only in low-threat contexts.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...