Our research focuses on relationships between neurodevelopment and the emergence of psychopathology in middle childhood and early adolescence. Using a variety of methods (EEG, fMRI, behavior, hormones) we ask how core affective and cognitive processes, including emotion reactivity/regulation, response to social feedback, and reward processing, change in early puberty and mechanistically contribute to the emergence of depression and borderline personality disorder.

A common approach in our work is to first examine typical neurodevelopment using fMRI and EEG, then to ask how adversity impacts typical development, and finally to ask how differences in development contribute to risk and resilient outcomes in later adolescence and beyond.