We often discuss psychiatric disorders as illnesses of adulthood, but disorders linked to anxiety, impulse control, and feeding often first emerge in adolescence. Early life stress (ELS) during postnatal development increases the lifetime risk for psychopathologies, with stress in development being associated with higher rates of negative outcomes than similar events in adulthood. Investigating the early phases of neural development, and how stress perturbs normative development, is key to understanding the mechanisms underlying psychiatric disorders. The work in our lab focuses on the developing brain (juvenile to adult) to identify the changes that tip the scales between a healthy brain and one at risk for stress-related psychiatric disorders. Research questions include how neural circuit changes promote adolescent compulsive reward-seeking, how adolescent reward-learning alters reward processing (learning, expression, and motivation) in adulthood, and how stress impacts neural circuit development.