Research

My research examines how early-life stress, both heritable and environmental, shapes the development of self-regulation, mental health, and biological stress systems across childhood and adolescence. I use longitudinal, genetically informed designs (including adoption studies) and advanced statistical modeling to identify pathways of risk and resilience. I am particularly interested in how caregiving environments and contextual stress exposures interact with children’s stress sensitivity to influence developmental outcomes. Ultimately, my work aims to inform more precise, developmentally grounded interventions to support youth and families.

Poverty, Self-Regulation, and Adolescent Health

During my PhD, I designed and carried out projects aimed at understanding how early-life stress, especially poverty and family adversity, shapes the development of self-regulation and health across childhood and adolescence. I utilized large-scale, longitudinal datasets and genetically informed designs to investigate how individual and contextual stress exposures influence youth outcomes through both behavioral and biological mechanisms.

I used data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD) to examine how self-regulation mechanisms help explain the link between early poverty exposure and adolescent allostatic load.

Gordon et al. (2024)

In a subsequent project, I used a prospective, longitudinal parent-offspring adoption design to test how birth mother life stress and adoptive parental stress shape adolescent self-regulation.

My last dissertation chapter expands on this work by leveraging the Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) cohorts dataset to assess whether the developmental timing of childhood exposure to poverty (early childhood, middle childhood, adolescence) impacts adolescent emotional, behavioral, and physiological health outcomes, and whether family level factors (i.e., parental stress and adversity) moderate these relationships.

Cognition and Physical activity

I recruited patients from the Emergency department as a research associate at the Yale School of Medicine for a hyperkalemia management clinical trial. I also worked on several studies examining the effects of traumatic health events, such as heart surgery, on cognition. Additionally, I helped design, implement, and conduct an intervention to examine if exercise can improve cognitive outcomes in cardiac patients.

Gene x Environment

I completed my Master of Science degree at Brown University in the Behavioral and Social Health Sciencess. For my thesis work, I analyzed data from a sibling-comparison study of children whose mothers changed smoking behavior between pregnancies using hierarchical linear models with SAS, finding that deficits in inhibitory control are due to a spectrum of co-occurring environmental risk factors beyond smoking during pregnancy.

Github repository examining the effects of Maternal Smoking During Pregnancy on the child's inhibitory control

Behavioral Science

From 2016-2020, I coordinated data collection, recruited participants, and maintained participant databases for a randomized controlled trial for smoking cessation using positive psychotherapy at the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies at Brown University School of Public Health.

ClinicalTrials.gov