Current Directions
[Our lab studies three main areas described below]
Adolescent Experiences Across Development
This branch examines adolescent experiences across development. Specifically, we explore changes in thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, including early signs of severe mental illness, and how they shape, and are shaped by, everyday developmental contexts like social media use, social relationships, and sleep, as well as their impacts on social and emotional health and wellbeing. We are also interested in the ways early life experiences further shape these thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. This work examines these questions both longitudinally, across developmental time, and at the day-to-day level, using intensive methods like ecological momentary assessment and daily diary designs to capture how adolescents' experiences unfold and fluctuate in real time.
Neurodevelopmental Processes
This branch focuses on the neurobiological systems that give rise to risk for severe mental illness during adolescence, with particular attention to reward circuitry (frontostriatal function and connectivity), pubertal development (hormonal and physical maturation as a sensitive period for risk), and inflammatory processes. This work integrates affective neuroscience methods, including task-based and resting-state fMRI, with hormonal and immune markers to characterize how these systems jointly shape trajectories of risk, particularly in the context of early life stress.
Additionally, with support from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation Young Investigator Award, we aim to examine how reward-related cortical morphology and pubertal hormones interact and contribute to anhedonia development in adolescent girls.
Prevention and Intervention
This branch translates findings from the first two areas into frameworks for prevention and intervention, including approaches informed by Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and related transdiagnostic frameworks targeting emotion regulation and reward-based mechanisms. The goal is to identify actionable, mechanism-based targets, rooted in neurodevelopmental and experiential data, that can inform early identification and intervention before serious mental illness fully emerges.