Developmental Brown Bag: Adversity, Resilience and the Developing Brain

Abstract
Over the past four years, my colleagues and I have examined the effects of early adversity on brain development and mental health in longitudinal sample of adolescents followed since birth. In this talk, I will present the following: types and rates of adversity experienced, rates of specific forms of psychopathology, longitudinal correlates of specific forms of childhood adversity on adolescent brain development, and possible social as well as neurobiological pathways to resilience.


Bio
Chris is a Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry. He is also a Research Professor in the Survey Research Center at ISR and the Center for Human Growth and Development. Chris received his PhD in Child Psychology with a minor in Neuroscience from the University of Minnesota. He then went on to the NIMH Intramural Research Program where he was a postdoc and later a fellow. His research program involves two active and related lines of research. In the first line, he is examining how poverty-related stressors and the developmental timing of those stressors impact brain development, stress hormone regulation and anxiety as well as depression symptoms during adolescence. For the second line of research, he is investigating how effective treatments for anxiety (cognitive behavioral therapy or medication) alter brain function and how these brain alterations relate to clinical outcome in children and adolescents.