Lauren B
- Research Program Mentor
PhD candidate at Stanford University
Expertise
psychology (affective science/clinical, developmental, and social), neuroscience, research methods, statistics
Bio
Hi there, I'm Lauren! My curiosity about the neural determinants of human behavior sparked at an early age. I completed my undergraduate degree in psychology at CU Boulder and completed my PhD at Stanford University. I am currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School and McLean Hospital studying how measures of brain activation predict treatment response to antidepressant medication. I am also interested in infant brain development, reward processing, early life stress, and mental health following the COVID-19 pandemic. Please see my Google Scholar page for more info https://tinyurl.com/yybxj85o! I absolutely love hiking, singing shows, and connecting with friends. Mentors shape the way we work with others. I entered this field with great enthusiasm and determination and would be thrilled to share this with others.Project ideas
An Investigation into the Neural Mechanisms Underlying Depression Following Early Life Stress
Early life stress affects 50% of children in the United States, and is associated with a number of adverse mental and physical health outcomes. Indeed, traumatic experiences in early life are significant predictors of both child- and adult-onset psychiatric conditions, and increase individuals’ risk for developing depression. Although researchers have documented associations between early life stress and anomalous brain structure and function in adolescents, there is variability in the regions and circuits that have been identified in these studies and in the direction and nature of their associations with early life stress. For example, whereas some researchers have posited that early life stress delays brain development, others have suggested that early life stress accelerates brain development. Importantly, adolescence is characterized by brain plasticity and changes to the social environment and brain reorganization in response to exposure to stressful contexts may be adaptive. In this project, we will assess how early life stress influences brain development to better understand the etiology of depression.