Awards / News

 2024 Sandra G. Wiener Student Investigator Award, Anna Vannucci

Anna Vannucci is a doctoral candidate in Psychology at Columbia University, where she works in the Developmental Affective Neuroscience Lab (DANLab) under the mentorship of Dr. Nim Tottenham. Before pursuing her doctoral studies, Anna received a B.A. in Psychology from the College of the Holy Cross and an M.S. in Clinical Psychology from the Uniformed Services University. She spent a decade conducting research in clinical child psychology. This work inspired her to pursue a career in developmental neuroscience to understand how early environments shape the neurobiology of human emotional development. Anna is currently a D-SPAN Scholar and was previously a Fulbright Scholar. Her work has been supported by the American Psychological Foundation, International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, and National Institutes of Health. Anna’s research broadly asks: how is brain development influenced by early interpersonal (i.e., caregiving) adversity, and what affective knowledge is represented within these altered circuits? To address these questions, she leverages experimental, neuroimaging, machine learning, and experience sampling methods. Anna’s dissertation aims to determine how adaptations in midline cortico-subcortical circuitry following early adversity represent the interpersonal-affective “attachment” schemas learned during early caregiving experiences. Anna’s long-term goal is to lead an interdisciplinary research team that investigates the developmental neurocomputational mechanisms that link early-life adversity to affective behaviors.

Nicole Walasek, PhD Postdoctoral Researcher University of Amsterdam, Evolutionary and Population Biology, Netherlands
Awards / Meeting / News

2024 ISDP Dissertation Award Winner – Nicole Walasek, PhD

2024 ISDP Dissertation Award Winner – Nicole Walasek, PhD, Postdoctoral Researcher,
University of Amsterdam, Evolutionary and Population Biology, Netherlands. She will give a 10-minute talk at ISDP 2024 related to her dissertation on “The evolution and development of sensitive periods: Theoretical and statistical approaches.”

Job Announcements / News

Research Assistant Position – UConn

The Cognition, Action, and Psychophysiology (CAP) Lab (https://kidcaplab.uconn.edu/, PI: Dr. Kimberly Cuevas) in the Department of Psychological Sciences, at the University of Connecticut, Waterbury Campus is seeking a full-time Research Assistant 1. The successful candidate will play an integral role in managing a NICHD-funded study investigating the development of neural oscillatory rhythms and self-regulatory processes across the first 4 postnatal years; Project BUBBLES (Babies: Understanding Brains and Baseline Longitudinal EEG Study). There will also be opportunities to assist with other lab-related research projects at UConn.

Meeting / News

Symposium 6: THE INVESTIGATION OF THE INTERTWINED INFLUENCE OF EARLY-LIFE ADVERSITY AND GENETIC FACTORS THROUGHOUT DEVELOPMENT ACROSS FOUR LONGITUDINAL COHORTS: IMPLICATIONS FOR HEALTH AND BEHAVIORS

Early life adversity has the potential to influence brain development, biological systems, attitudes, and behaviors, which is hypothesized to subsequently affect physical and mental health in adulthood. However, the effects of these experiences vary across different domains of functioning and may not be uniform across individuals, necessitating further investigation into the genetic underpinnings of developmental outcomes through comprehensive, developmentally sensitive research designs. We also need to expand our search into both the endogenous and exogenous causal pathways at play, ranging from molecular mechanisms to the structural and broader social influences that shape life within our society. In the first presentation, Dr Larose will present the contributions of a polygenic score (PGS) for externalizing behaviors and latent profiles of neighborhood deprivation on conduct disorders during adolescence and show that the PGS and neighborhoods with crime and low-quality infrastructures both additively predict conduct disorders. Next, Dr Cantave will offer additional evidence that genetic predispositions for internalizing and externalizing problems are associated with higher risk encounter childhood adversity, although no such association is noted for peri-natal adversity. Delving deeper into the possibility that genetic factors may be confounded with early-life adversity, Dr. Ouellet-Morin will show that childhood maltreatment is more likely to arise among children with a genetic predisposition for aggression and shed light on how these experiences partly explain how the PGS predict developmental trajectories of global and reactive aggression during adolescence. Finally, using advanced genomics and translational animal models, Dr Pelufo Silveira will show that brain-specific gene networks responsive to early stress and insulin, have a sex-dependent modulation of adversity response mediated by brain insulin, particularly in dopaminergic pathways influencing behavior and decision-making.