2025 Sandra G. Wiener Student Investigator Award – Jessica Sperber

Jessica Sperber
Doctoral Candidate
Teachers College, Columbia University
Department of Human Development
New York, USA

Twitter: @Jess_Sperber

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Jessica is an F31 NRSA Predoctoral Fellow at Teachers College, Columbia University studying Developmental Psychology. She is co-mentored by Dr. Kimberly Noble and Dr. Tyler Watts. Broadly, Jessica’s research program studies the mechanisms that explain the long-term effect of early adversity on overall functioning, as well as effective interventions for disrupting those patterns. She is particularly interested in epigenetics as a potential mechanism to explain how early adversity “gets under the skin” to impact life-long trajectories.

Jessica’s dissertation research examines the associations among early adversity, epigenetic aging, and development across early childhood. She leverages DNA methylation data to examine when in early childhood epigenetic disparities emerge; under what conditions do they emerge; and the functional significance of these biomarkers for development in real-time. In 2024, Jessica was awarded an F31 from NICHD to support this dissertation research.

Prior to her doctoral studies, Jessica completed her Bachelor’s in psychology at Muhlenberg College. She then held post-baccalaureate research positions at both Indiana University and New York University. Jessica’s long-term goal is to become an independent investigator examining the biological embedding of social inequality and testing ways of combatting those effects to improve children’s developmental trajectories.