Eli Susman, Rachel Martino, and Jimmy Huettig, current research coordinators in the Stress and Development Lab, have all been recognized by the National Science Foundation for their applications to the Graduate Research Fellowship Program for 2021!
The NSF GRFP is a highly-competitive fellowship intended to fund promising doctoral students in STEM-related master’s and doctoral programs.
Rachel and Jimmy's applications have received honorable mention, and they will have...
Lab Director, Katie A. McLaughlin, speaks with the Harvard Gazette about child mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. The interview discusses the lessons learned from research on natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina and exposure to other types of stressful life events about how the pandemic is likely to shape child mental health over the coming years. Dr. McLaughlin also discusses ongoing research from the Stress and Development Lab that identifies factors that promote resilience against stress-related mental health problems in children during the pandemic. Read the full...
David Weissman, a post-doc in the Stress and Development Lab has been awarded a Young Scientist Transition Award from the Harvard Brain Science Initiative. The Young Scientist Transition Awards, made possible with funding from the Office of the Provost, are designed to provide relief funding to neuroscience postdocs at Harvard University whose career progress has been significantly delayed by institutional shutdowns, slowdowns and delays in job search processes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. ...
Rachel Romeo, post-doctoral fellow in the Stress and Development Lab, has received the K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award from the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development. Her project is entitled “Language Input as a Mechanism Underlying Socioeconomic Disparities in Neurocognitive Development.” On average, children from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds exhibit disparities in academic achievement and cognitive development, compared to children from higher socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. Rachel’s studies will investigate the role of specific dimensions of... Read more about Post-Doc Rachel Romeo awarded a K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award from NICHD
In a meta-analysis with over 100,000 participants published in Psychological Bulletin, Stress and Development Lab research demonstrates that experiencing adversity in childhood is associated with accelerated biological aging across three separate metrics of aging - the timing of puberty, indicators of cellular aging, as well as patterns of brain development. Importantly, however, these effects were not observed for all types of early adversity. Only exposure to violence or experiences that involve a significant threat to the child were associated with this acceleration in the...
Maya Rosen, research associate in the Stress and Development Lab, has received the K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award from the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development. Her project is entitled “Neurodevelopmental mechanisms linking environmental experience and executive function.” Socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with differences in cognitive and academic outcomes with children from disadvantaged backgrounds have lower performance than their advantaged counterparts. Maya’s studies will investigate environmental and neurodevelopmental mechanisms explaining SES-... Read more about Research Associate Maya Rosen awarded a K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award from NICHD
At the February 2020 NIMH Advisory Council Meeting, NIMH Director Josh Gordon features work recently published in Biological Psychiatry. Director Gordon applauds the study of neurobiological mechanisms of resilience to psychopathology in a particularly vulnerable population of adolescents with history of adversity. The paper, lead by postdoc Alexandra Rodman, found that the greater recruitment of frontoparietal control networks to modulate amygdala reactivity to negative cues was a protective factor that buffered children from worsening depression following... Read more about Director of NIMH highlights work from the Stress and Development Lab
Katie A. McLaughlin, Director of the Stress and Development Lab, received a MERIT Award from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) for her grant entitled: Neurodevelopmental Mechanisms Underlying Stress Vulnerability during Adolescence. According to NIMH, MERIT Awards are intended to "provide long-term stable support to investigators whose research competence and productivity are distinctly superior and who are likely to continue to perform in an outstanding manner. " The MERIT Award will provide the Stress and Development Lab with 10 years of stable funding to investigate the... Read more about Katie A. McLaughlin, lab director, wins a MERIT Award from the National Institute of Mental Health
Maya Rosen, a postdoc in the Stress and Development Lab, has received the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Annual Meeting Postdoctoral Fellow Award for her work on neural mechanisms underlying the income-achievement gap. This work used functional MRI to investigate the neural networks that support memory-guided and cued attention in in school-aged children. Results revealed that recruitment of visual processing regions in the ventral temporal cortex during both cued and memory-guided attention was...
