Activities
Upcoming events
Winter, 2019
Asta Breinholt, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow affiliate at the Population Research Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. Dr. Breinholt's research focuses on the mechanisms of intergenerational transmission. Her Ph.D. thesis analyzed how parental education affects parenting, how parenting in turn affects children's skills, and how children convert these skills into educational success. Her current work examines the relationships between genetic inheritance, parents' socioeconomic resources, parenting, and children's outcomes.
Presentation title: Differential parenting by offspring genetic makeup
Brenda Volling, PhD, is Lois Wladis Hoffman Collegiate Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the social and emotional development of infants and young children and the role of family relationships in facilitating children’s developmental outcomes. She is particularly interested in the role of fathers, the quality of sibling relationships, and parent-infant attachment. Her current research focuses on changes in the family and the older child’s adjustment after the birth of a second child (the Family Transitions Study), postpartum depression and infant attachment, the development of young children’s prosocial behavior, and sibling jealousy.
Presentation title: Fathering in the 21st century and what it means for children
Pamela Davis-Kean, PhD, is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan where her research focuses on the various pathways that the socio-economic status (SES) of parents relates to the cognitive/achievement outcomes (particularly mathematics) of their children. Her primary focus is on parental educational attainment and how it can influence the development of the home environment throughout childhood, adolescence, and the transition to adulthood. Davis-Kean is also a Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research where she is the Program Director of the Population, Neurodevelopment, and Genetics (PNG) program. This collaboration examines the complex transactions of brain, biology, and behavior as children and families develop across time. She is interested in how both the micro (brain and biology) and macro (family and socioeconomic conditions) aspects of development relate to cognitive changes in children across the lifespan.
Presentation title: Understanding parenting using population and "big data" sources
Jule Krüger, PhD, is Sponsored Affiliate of the Center for Political Studies, University of Michigan, and a Visiting Scholar with the Department of Political Science, Michigan State University. She is a conflict and violence scholar and contribute to the fields of Comparative Politics, International Relations, and Methodology. She is currently conducting a research project on the documentation of abuses by human rights defenders that is being funded by the Gerdan Henkel Foundation.
Presentation title: Critical issues and methodology to consider when doing social science research with Twitter data
Past events
Winter, 2018
Lauren Bader recently completed her Ph.D. in Child and Family Studies at the University of Tennessee and currently works with Dr. Brenda Volling at the Center for Human Growth and Development at the University of Michigan. Her research interests include cross-cultural variation in infant social-emotional development and mother-infant attachment and the relationship between attachment and infant and mother cortisol reactivity to stress.
Presentation title: The ecocultural underpinnings of mothers' beliefs and responses to infant emotions.
Dr. Jenny Radesky, Assistant Professor, Pediatrics-Developmental/Behavioral, Pediatrics
Dr. Radesky is an Assistant Professor in Developmental Behavioral Pediatrics at the University of Michigan Medical School. She received her M.D. from Harvard Medical School, trained in pediatrics at Seattle Children’s Hospital, and completed fellowship training in developmental behavioral pediatrics at Boston Medical Center. Her research interests include use of mobile technology by parents and young children and how this relates to child self-regulation, parent mental health, and parent-child interaction. Clinically, her work focuses on developmental and behavioral problems in low-income and underserved populations, family advocacy, parent-child relationship difficulties, and autism spectrum disorder. She was lead author of the 2016 American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement on digital media use in early childhood.
Alison Miller, Associate Professor, Health Behavior & Health Education; Research Associate Professor, Center for Human Growth and Development
My research program focuses on how individual child factors, social relationships and contextual processes shape healthy development for children growing up in poverty and who have experienced adverse early life events. Self-regulation, managing stress and adversity, and the influence of social context are themes throughout my work. I study how the balance between biological, social-behavioral, and broader contextual influences can shift over time, and seek to apply this developmental perspective to both inform our understanding of how developmental science can inform basic research on children’s health, as well as to improve health outcomes for young, high-risk children.
Integrating a developmental science perspective is essential in order to address public health concerns that disproportionately affect low-income children. To achieve this goal, I collaborate with colleagues across disciplines and community partners to translate research findings into intervention approaches that may ultimately reduce health disparities and foster positive health and well-being outcomes for children and families.
More details about Prof. Miller's lab can be found on the lab website.
Dr. Jenalee Doom is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Human Growth and Development. She completed her Ph.D. in child psychology at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development. Her research focuses on 1) the biological and behavioral pathways by which childhood stress affects mental and physical health, 2) socioemotional processes by which individuals are buffered from stress to promote positive health, and 3) the interaction between childhood stress and nutrition in predicting mental and physical health into adulthood. Her current research is funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Chronic, severe stressors in childhood, such as maltreatment and poverty, have been associated with mental and physical health problems across the lifespan. However, positive social relationships, including those with parents, are protective against some of the negative effects of early stress. I will present research using a large nationally representative sample documenting how adolescent-parent relationships may be cardioprotective or confer additional risk for cardiovascular disease. I will also describe my experimental work on social buffering by parents and friends, a mechanism by which social relationships may protect children and adolescents from the effects of chronic or severe stress to improve health across the lifespan
Fall, 2017
Dr. Megan Pesch, Clinical Lecturer, Developmental Behavioral Pediatrics
Parental Feeding Beliefs and Practices in an Obesogenic Food Environment
In today's obesity promoting environment parents are faced with the challenge of steering their children away from exposure to unhealthy foods. But with the wide availability of junk food, this is an almost impossible task. Parents need to help their children choose healthy foods and portion sizes, yet few guidelines exist to help them navigate this terrain. Dr. Pesch's work examines mothers beliefs and practices in feeding their children and associated child obesity risk. She focuses on understanding how parents can limit their children's intake of junk food in a sensitive and effective way.
Sarita Yardi Schoenebeck, Assistant Professor, University of Michigan School of Information
Dr. Schoenebeck's research is in the areas of Social Computing, Social Media, and Human-Computer Interaction with a particular focus on families and social media use. Some current projects in her research group are exploring ways of mitigating online harassment, ecommerce in peer-to-peer communities, and families' use of social media. Dr. Schoenebeck's work has received Best Paper and Honorable Mention Awards at the Computer Human Interaction (CHI) conference. In 2017, she received the UMSI Faculty award for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Julie Ma, Assistant Professor of Social Work at the University of Michigan--Flint
Professor Ma’s research interests center around the effects of neighborhood disadvantage and negative parenting on the well-being of children. Her research builds on her experience in parent education programs that serve families in marginalized communities in Michigan. Much of her current research focuses on the risks of negative contextual and family influences such as neighborhood poverty and disorganization, and parental corporal punishment on behavior problems and maltreatment in early childhood.
Julie's recent article: Associations of neighborhood disorganization and maternal spanking with children’s aggression: A fixed-effects regression analysis in Child Abuse & Neglect.
Shawna J. Lee, Associated Professor of Social Work at the University of Michigan--Ann Arbor
Lee has published more than 40 research articles and book chapters, with primary focus on child maltreatment prevention, fathers' parenting behaviors and father-child relations, and the effects of parental corporal punishment on child wellbeing. Recently she collaborated with MDRC to create the DadTime parenting app. She is pilot testing "Text4dad," a text messaging program for expecting and new fathers. You can learn more about these projects and the Parenting in Context Research Lab at parentingincontext.org. Her research has been funded by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, Michigan Health Endowment Fund, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
