2015 Workshop

The 2015 Fragile Families Summer Data Workshop included special sections on the genetic data collected during the Year 9 wave.

 

assary

Elham Assary

Elham Assary is a PhD student at the School of Biological and Chemical Sciences at Queen Mary, University of London, UK. Her PhD research focuses on individual differences in susceptibility to environmental influences. She is particularly interested in the contribution of genetics to variability in environmental sensitivity, and how genetic factors interact with environmental contexts to influence outcomes.
email: [email protected]

 

barban

Nicola Barban

Nicola Barban is a Senior Research Associate at the Department of Sociology, University of Oxford. His research interests include genetics and fertility, demography and life course research. He is currently working on a research project on the role of genes and gene-environment (GxE) interaction on reproductive behaviour.
email: [email protected]

 

barnhart

Sheila Barnhart

Sheila Barnhart is a doctoral candidate with The Ohio State University College of Social Work.  She is a licensed independent social worker with experience working in health care since 2003.  Her research interests include reducing/eliminating disparities in maternal and child health, translational social work research, and poverty.  She is particularly interested in exploring the relationships between child wellbeing and social capital. 
email: [email protected]

 

boch

Samantha J. Boch

Samantha J. Boch is a corrections nurse and PhD student at The Ohio State University College of Nursing.  Her overall research interests center on the linkages of social environments and factors (e.g. parental incarceration) and the psychological, biological, and behavioral pathways in which they affect health disparities across the lifespan.
email: [email protected]

 

borja

Sharon Borja

Sharon Borja is a PhD Candidate in Social Welfare at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on life course and intergenerational processes of adversity accumulation and their impact on child wellbeing and parent mental health. She specializes in the developmental and social context of adversity, especially within families of color who are at the intersection of racial disparities, multi-form adversities, and multiple systems involvement.
email: [email protected]

 

bryan

Brielle Bryan

Brielle Bryan is a doctoral student in the Social Policy & Sociology program at Harvard University.  Her research interests include poverty, incarceration, youth, social mobility, educational inequality, and neighborhoods.  Her current research investigates the implications of mass incarceration for children and families in the US. 
email: [email protected]

 

bullinger

Lindsey Bullinger

Lindsey Bullinger is a Ph.D. student in the Public Affairs program at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, concentrating in public policy analysis and public finance. Her primary research interests include child and family policy, maternal and infant health policy, and antipoverty programs. In particular, she is interested in how public policies can impact parental childbearing and child rearing decisions, and how these decisions and policies can affect children's health and well-being. 
email: [email protected]

 

busso

Daniel Busso

Daniel Busso is a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His research interests are to better understand the impact of early adversity (maltreatment, trauma, and poverty) on developmental, educational, and mental health outcomes in children and adolescents. 
email: [email protected]

 

conway

Anne Conway

Anne Conway is an Assistant Professor of Social Work and a faculty member of CPRC. Her research focuses on the early antecedents and health/mental health sequela of executive function and self-regulation in children and youth. In her recent publications, she has reported the relations between early parenting and children's temperament in the prediction of preschool executive functions and emotion regulation; the role of attention control in moderating relations between negative affect and neural correlates of action monitoring in adolescents; and the long-term effects of 9/11 on young toddlers and their mothers using a naturalistic, quasi-experimental design. 
email: [email protected]

 

enami

Kohei Enami

Kohei Enami is a postdoctoral scholar in Department of Public Health Sciences at University of California, Davis. His research interests include causes and consequences of childhood health, mental health, and public policy 
email: [email protected]

 

fernandez

Cristina Fernández

Cristina Fernández is a board-certified pediatrician and the General Academic Pediatrics Fellow in the Department of Pediatrics at the Columbia University Medical Center. Her research focuses on markers of poverty and economic insecurities and their impact on child health and developmental outcomes. She is particularly interested in food insecurity, energy insecurity, and housing insecurity and child health issues of asthma, obesity, and early childhood development. 
email: [email protected]

 

fusco

Rachel A. Fusco

Rachel A. Fusco, PhD, MSW is an Associate Professor in the University Of Pittsburgh School Of Social Work. Her research focuses on the mental health of young children who experience child maltreatment and/or exposure to intimate partner violence. Dr. Fusco is particularly interested in interracial families. 
email: [email protected]

 

gard

Arianna Gard

Arianna is a Developmental Psychology PhD student at the University of Michigan studying the effects of parenting and contextual stressors on brain development across childhood. She is particularly interested in utilizing imaging genetics methods to study the underlying mechanisms linking parenting to child behavior.  
email: [email protected]

 

goldberg

Rachel Goldberg

Rachel Goldberg is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California Irvine. Her research interests include youth health, adolescent romantic and sexual relationships, and family influences on the health and wellbeing of youth.
email: [email protected]

 

hein

Tyler Hein

Tyler Hein is a doctoral student in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan. She received her B.S. in Neuroscience from the University of Pittsburgh (2013). She is interested in the impact of early life stress on neural development, and how this relates to adolescent psychopathology.
email: [email protected]

 

hunt

Tenah K. A. Hunt

Tenah Hunt, MPH, is a doctoral student in the Social Welfare Program at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Her research interests include (1) the design and evaluation of programs and policies preventing child maltreatment within low income families of color; and (2) understanding the influence of early childhood adversities on adolescent socio-emotional well-being. 
email: [email protected]

 

isom

Deena Isom

Deena Isom is an assistant professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina. She received her PhD from Emory University in May 2015, and her dissertation was entitled "Race, Racism, and Crime: An Empirical Assessment of African American Offending." She has published in the Journal of Criminal Justice and the Handbook of the Social Psychology of Inequality. Her research interests include criminological theory, justice, violence, and the intersectionality of race and gender. She aims to bring race and gender central to the criminological literature by addressing how social psychological processes help explain the emergence of negative outcomes across age, class, gender, and racial lines. 
email: [email protected]

 

jackson

Karen Moran Jackson

Karen Moran Jackson is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis at The University of Texas at Austin.  Her research interests center on adolescent development and how gender, race, and ethnicity guide developmental processes.  She is also interested in the effects of parenting on developmental and academic outcomes. 
email: [email protected]

 

jobe

Lisa Jobe-Shields

Lisa Jobe-Shields is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Studies in the Department of Psychology at the University of Richmond. Her research focuses on family relationships, emotional functioning, and mental health treatment in families impacted by traumatic stress at multiple generations. 
email: [email protected]

 

karberg

Liz Karberg

Liz Karberg is a Research Scientist at ChildTrends. She is interested in parenting (mothers and fathers), family processes, and children's development within low-income and at risk populations. Her current research examines under what familial conditions (e.g., marital structure, child temperament) changes in family structure influence children's social development, and why (e.g., because of conflict within the family).  
email: [email protected]

 

kuo

Patty Kuo

Patty Kuo is a Ph.D. candidate in Developmental Psychology at the University of Michigan.  She investigates multiple levels of influence on family processes with an emphasis on fathers of young children and infants. She is particularly interested in the interplay of biological, cognitive, and social influences on fathering behavior and family dynamics. 
email: [email protected]

 

lane

Abby Lane

Abby Lane is a doctoral student in public policy at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Her broad research interests include social welfare policy, family policy, poverty reduction, and child and family well-being. 
email: [email protected]

 

larson

Matthew Larson

Matthew Larson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Wayne State University. His research focuses on the implications of romantic involvement/instability for crime across the life course, violence, and incarceration. 
email: [email protected]

 

li

Xian Li

Xian "Stella" Li is a PhD candidate in Department of Educational and Counseling Psychology at University at Albany, State University of New York. Xian’s research aims to understand how different contextual factors such as parenting practice, peer relations are associated with child psychosocial functioning. Particularly, she would like to investigate the patterns of parental influence on children’ emotional well-being and school performance from the perspective of sociocultural mediation. 
email: [email protected]

 

lin

Ching-Hsuan Lin

Ching-Hsuan Lin, MSW, is a PhD student in the School of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include child maltreatment, kinship care, family preservation, immigrant and racial minority families, and intersection of immigration and child welfare. 
email: [email protected]

 

killewald

Alexandra Killewald

Alexandra "Sasha" Killewald is an Assocate Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. Her research takes a demographic approach to the study of social stratification in the contemporary United States and focuses on the family and workplace as sites for the production and reproduction of inequality by gender and class.
email: [email protected]

 

littlewood

Kerry Littlewood

Kerry Littlewood is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at East Carolina University. Her research examines individual and psychosocial structural factors that influence health behavior among marginalized and vulnerable families, with a special focus on kinship care and Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus. 
email: [email protected]

 

lowe

Sarah Lowe

Sarah Lowe is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Montclair State University. Her research focuses on the long-term mental health consequences of traumatic events, mechanisms that maintain or alleviate symptoms over time, and multilevel influences on post-trauma functioning. 
email: [email protected]

 

mcfayden

Lisa S. McFadyen-Ketchum

Lisa S. McFadyen-Ketchum is a doctoral candidate in Developmental Psychology at the University of Denver. She is generally interested in how stress disrupts positive developmental trajectories. In particular, her research focuses on exploring risk and resilience among children at the highest risk for poor cognitive, social-emotional, and health outcomes. 
email: [email protected]

 

mireles

Amanda Mireles

Amanda Mireles is a PhD Student in Sociology at Stanford University.  Before graduate school, she worked on Housing Policy and Neighborhoods and Youth Development research at the Urban Institute. She is broadly interested in social stratification, poverty, sociology of family, and race and ethnicity.
email: [email protected]

 

mitchell

Charlie Mitchell

Charlie Mitchell is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. His research interests include early childhood education, resilience, and social stratification. His dissertation focuses on the processes by which some disadvantage children attain high levels of cognitive and non-cognitive skills. 
email: [email protected]

 

Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study logo of two letter F's back-to-back.

Anahid Modrek

Anahid Modrek is a doctoral student in Developmental Psychology at Columbia University. A fellow at the Columbia Population Research Center, and an international Luys Scholar at Columbia University, Anahid's research interests involve the intersection of developmental psychology, resilience, and education, as well as socioeconomic variation and its effects on equity in education. Anahid received her Bachelors degrees in both Psychology and Public Policy, from UC Berkeley, where she intertwined the study of human development from a micro intrapersonal perspective in the Department of Psychology, as well as a macro organization perspective through the study of policy, at the Goldman School of Public Policy. 
email: [email protected]

 

moniz

Michelle Moniz

Dr. Moniz is an Assistant in the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology at the University of Michigan, and a board-eligible obstetrician-gynecologist. Her research focuses on health behaviors in low-income pregnant and postpartum women and the impact of these behaviors on child wellbeing. 
email: [email protected]

 

pandey

Abhishek Pandey

Abhishek Pandey, MD, is a Clinical Instructor in the Department of Family Medicine, Medicine, and Neurology at SUNY Downstate Medical Center. The core objective of his investigations is to develop, implement and apply evidence-based behavioral interventions targeted at sleep disorders in minority children and caregivers, especially through peer educators. 
email: [email protected]

 

pirozzolo

Kathleen Pirozzolo Fay

Kathleen Pirozzolo Fay is a doctoral student at the Rutgers University School of Social Work.  She is interested in risk factors contributing to youth engagement in behaviors that may lead to juvenile justice involvement, particularly maltreatment and victimization, as well as youth resilience.
email: [email protected]

 

pollenz

Kathryn Pollenz Smith

Kathryn Pollenz Smith is a doctoral student at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.  Her research interests relate to understanding how social and physical environments affect the health of low-income children and adolescents, specifically how stress and early life adversity impacts child health and wellness, and how resilience, structural and social supports may buffer adversity to promote healthy development and protect health. 
email: [email protected]

 

pugh

Tracy Pugh

Tracy Pugh, MHS, is a DrPH student in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health. Her research interests are in structural stigma, particularly institutional racism, and how it manifests through institutions of social control and punitive policies, including those contributing to mass criminalization. 
email: [email protected]

 

ramos

María A. Ramos Olazagasti

María A. Ramos Olazagasti, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Columbia University – N. Y. State Psychiatric Institute. Her research focuses on how minority status and different contexts relevant to ethnic minority youth affect their health and well-being. She is also interested in using sophisticated data-analytic techniques to improve our understanding of change, development, and the processes by which risk and protective factors affect minority children’s mental and physical health. 
email: [email protected]

 

rojas

Natalia Rojas

Natalia Rojas is a doctoral student in the Psychology and Social Intervention program at New York University. Broadly, her research interests are at the intersection of educational research and social policy. More specifically, her interest areas include the effects of program and policies related to poverty reduction, immigration and early childhood on the lives of low-income families. 
email: [email protected]

 

roundfield

Katrina Roundfield

Katrina Roundfield, PhD is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, San Francisco. Katrina is interested in understanding how early adversity affects socio-emotional development and school problems among ethnic minority and low-income children. She is particularly interested in identifying psychosocial risk and protective factors to inform school-based mental health interventions. 
email: [email protected]

 

salhi

Carmel Salhi

Dr. Carmel Salhi is an Assistant Professor of Health Sciences at Northeastern University. His research focuses on the pathways through which contexts of violence and poverty affect child and adolescent development, combining qualitative, epidemiological and cognitive psychological methods. 
email: [email protected]

 

samek

Diana Samek

Diana “Di” Samek is an Assistant Professor in the Human Development and Family Studies Department at Auburn University. Di’s program of research is centered on studying adolescent and young adult development, particularly on the topic of substance use and externalizing disorders. Di uses developmental psychopathology and biopsychosocial frameworks in her research and is most interested in studying how person-level factors correlate and interact with environmental contexts and social relationships to influence adolescent and young adult development. Di is particularly interested in social influences of the parent-child, sibling, and peer relationships, as well as processes of gene-environment and person-environment interplay as they apply to the onset of substance use during adolescence and a persistent course of substance use problems through young adulthood.
email: [email protected]

 

sanchez

Raul Sanchez

Raul Sanchez is a PhD student in the department of Agriculture and consumer economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His concentration is econometrics, development economics and child development. 
email: [email protected]

 

schlomer

Gabriel L. Schlomer

Gabriel L. Schlomer is an Assistant Professor of Developmental Psychology at University of Albany-SUNY. His major research interests are in gene-environment interplay, adolescent health risk behaviors, and parent-child relations.  
email: [email protected]

 

schneider

Samantha Schneider

Samantha Schneider is currently a doctoral candidate at Simmons College School of Social Work. She has Master of Social Work and Master of Theological Studies degrees from Boston University. Her post graduate clinical work has been focused on working with children and families in community mental health settings, and she currently works as a clinician in the Preschool Outreach Program at The Home for Little Wanderers. Clinical specializations include play therapy, child parent psychotherapy, trauma treatment, and school mental health consultation. Her research interests include childhood exposure to community violence, ways to more effectively incorporate trauma informed practices into school settings, and early childhood mental health.
email: [email protected]

 

schneper

Lisa Schneper

Lisa Schneper, PhD, is a professional specialist in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. Her research interests include gene X environment interaction, environmental effects on the epigenome, and identification of disease-associated genetic variation. 
email: [email protected]

 

schroeder

Allison Schroeder

Allison Schroeder is a doctoral student in the Department of Family Science at the University of Maryland and a Licensed Couple and Family Therapist. Her research interests include maternal mental health in contexts of cumulative disadvantage, the processes by which parental health and child health shape each other over time, and policy and program interventions to reduce health disparities. 
email: [email protected]

 

shelleby

Elizabeth Shelleby

Elizabeth Shelleby is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Northern Illinois University.  Her research focuses on the development of child disruptive behavior problems, preventive interventions for at-risk populations, parenting practices, child emotion regulation, and the influence of contextual stressors on child mental health.
email: [email protected]

 

shi

Yi Shi

Yi Shi is a doctoral candidate of Applied Developmental Psychology program in Psychology at Fordham University. Her research focuses on the vulnerable population of youth who are in transition to their adulthood (e.g., high school dropouts in transition to employment/post-secondary education, unwed mothers in transition to stable family unions). She is particularly interested in using statistic modeling (e.g., structural equation model, hierarchical linear model) to investigate the concurrent and prospective associations of psychological constructs and behavioral outcomes.  
email: [email protected]

 

sulik

Michael J. Sulik

Michael J. Sulik is an assistant research scientist in the Institute of Human Development and Social Change at New York University. His research focuses on the relations between environmental influences in early childhood (especially parenting) and the development of children's self-regulation and psychopathology.  
email: [email protected]

 

sykes

Bryan L. Sykes

Bryan L. Sykes is an Assistant Professor of Criminology, Law and Society (and, by courtesy, Sociology and Public Health) at the University of California-Irvine. His research focuses on demographic methods, punishment/mass imprisonment, fertility, health, and social inequality.
email: [email protected]

 

Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study logo of two letter F's back-to-back.

Christian Villenas

Christian Villenas is a Senior Policy Analyst at Advocates for Children of New York (AFC) where he provides research and analysis of existing and emerging policy initiatives on the federal, state, and local levels related to education rights and education inequality. Christian has spent the last 15 years conducting program evaluation and policy and statistical analysis on projects related to education. His research has focused on social disparities in education, education policy, disability studies, the diffusion of new educational practices in schools, and college access. 
email: [email protected]

 

williams

Morgan C. Williams

Morgan C. Williams, Jr. is a Ph.D. Candidate in Economics at the City University of New York Graduate Center and a Visiting Student at the National Bureau of Economic Research.  His research interests are primarily in health economics, labor economics, and social economics.  His dissertation research focuses on the economics of mass incarceration and crime. 
email: [email protected]

 

zhao

Yunhan Zhao

Yunghan Zhao is a second year PhD. student at the University at Albany, SUNY. His research interests include crime and deviance, juvenile delinquency, white collar crimes and especially corruption in China. 
email: [email protected]