I research how experiences during development shape our brains, minds, and behavior.
Environmental experiences profoundly influence the course of development. This remarkable plasticity confers significant advantages for learning, but also heightened vulnerability to adverse experiences. For example, developmental plasticity enables us to learn languages, but also renders us susceptible to the stresses of neighborhood violence. Similarly, aberrant plasticity, even with optimal environments, may predispose development toward a range of disordered outcomes, including autism and schizophrenia.
I examine how experiences during sensitive periods of plasticity shape development and lead to healthy or maladaptive outcomes. I integrate behavioral paradigms with physiology, EEG, and fMRI neuroimaging to provide a mechanistic account of both developing and adult cognition and behavior.
Postdoctoral Positions,
Boston Children's Hospital,
Harvard University
2019- Postdoctoral Research Associate
2016-2018 Postdoctoral Fellow
2017 Fellow Award in Developmental Medicine
Here in the Labs of Cognitive Neuroscience (PI: Charles A. Nelson III), I have the privilege to work with several clinical populations to examine how disrupted brain plasticity affects learning from early environments (e.g. language, faces) and contributes to disordered development. I focus on infants at high-risk for Autism Spectrum Disorder and children with genetic syndromes caused by mutations in pathways regulating neuroplasticity. I developed and support the HAPPE software for EEG data processing in this position as well.
I am also excited to be part of a collaborative international team (PI: Takao K. Hensch) using a cross-species framework to understand how experiences of general anesthesia influence early neurocognitive development. In addition to outpatient visits in our lab, we have engineered mobile equipment that enables us to safely perform neuroimaging and behavioral assessments with Children's inpatients, including in NICU environments.
PhD, Columbia University
2016 PhD
2015 MPhil
2015 Edward E. Smith Memorial Award in Cognitive Neuroscience
I completed my PhD training at Columbia University in the Psychology Department with Dr. Nim Tottenham after she moved from UCLA in 2014. My dissertation examined the experience-driven development of amygdala-prefrontal cortex circuitry and associated emotion regulation behaviors. This research focused on understanding how normative experiences like emotional faces and music shape typical development as well as how early adverse experiences like institutionalization (e.g. orphanage care) alter developmental course. I examined how these experience-driven changes to brain circuitry affected subsequent emotion regulation behavior across development and in adulthood.
MA, University of California, Los Angeles
2012 MA
2012 Chancellor's Prize, Psychology
I began my PhD training at UCLA in the Developmental Psychology Department with Dr. Nim Tottenham. As a graduate student in her Developmental Affective Neuroscience Lab, I acquired expertise using behavioral, phsyiological, and structural and functional MRI methods with children, adolescents, and adults. I received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to examine the development of brain circuitry subserving emotion regulation behavior. Using a resting-state fMRI approach, I identified the time period when the amygdala-prefrontal cortex circuit appeared most unstable and plastic. My dissertation research built on these early studies to explicitly test when and how environmental experiences shape this plastic circuitry.
In 2014, Dr. Tottenham and the Developmental Affective Neuroscience Lab moved to Columbia University, so I changed PhD programs in order to complete my doctoral research in her lab.
MPhil, University of Cambridge
2011 MPhil
2010 Lionel de Jersey Harvard-Cambridge Award
I was fortunate to receive Harvard's Lionel de Jersey Fellowship which funds a postgraduate year of intellectual exploration at the University of Cambridge, England. In the lab of Dr. Nicola Clayton, I explored questions in comparative psychology about higher-order cognition in Corvidae, a highly-intelligent family of birds. For my M.Phil. project, in the context of food storing and stealing, I asked whether scrub jays demonstrate theory of mind (knowledge of what another bird knows, separate from one's own knowledge), and examined how social familiarity and hierarchy rankings affect punishment behavior. This rewarding year confirmed my interest in researching questions at the cognitive and behavioral levels in addition to my ongoing curiosity about brain function.
BA, Harvard College
2010 BA Summa cum Laude
As an undergraduate molecular biology major, I took Dr. Takao K. Hensch's course on experience-dependent brain development. It was love at first critical period mechanisms paper, and I knew then I wanted a career exploring questions about developmental plasticity in brain function and behavior. Dr. Charles A. Nelson guest-lectured in this same course about experiential influence in human brain development, and graciously accepted me as a thesis student. My undergraduate thesis focused on an EEG-based biomarker of atypical brain development and its relation to early affective behavior in infants at low- and high-risk for Autism Spectrum Disorder (since published as Gabard-Durnam et al., 2015).
Drs. Hensch and Nelson have continued to mentor me for over a decade now, and I was thrilled to return to Harvard to perform translational research with them both as a postdoctoral fellow.
Research Interests
Typical experience-driven development
Learning from environmental experiences is critical for healthy development. I study how and when normative, daily experiences, like music, language, and caregiving shape healthy brain function and behavior. Identifying these windows of plasticity when experiences heavily impact emotional and cognitive development is critical for both understanding and effectively intervening in mental health trajectories.
Development following adversity
Development is a period of heightened vulnerability when adverse experiences can have lasting impacts in a number of ways (as in right panel). I study how and when different adversities "get under the skin" to shape brain and behavior development. In particular, I focus on how disruptions to early caregiving experiences, including institutional (orphanage) care, alter development and lead to resilient or negative outcomes.
Development following general anesthesia
Each year, 1-2 million infants undergo general anesthesia in the US, which may be necessary for up to weeks at a time. This early general anesthesia sedates brain activity during a time typically characterized by rapid neurocognitive development. How and when does this sedation impact development? I examine sensory, cognitive, and language development in infants who undergo anesthesia during different windows in the first year of life.
Plasticity in Autism Spectrum Disorder
Aberrant brain plasticity has been implicated in a range of disorders, suggesting disrupted experience-driven development is a core feature of psychopathology. In particular, brain plasticity disruptions are thought to be central to Autism Spectrum Disorder. I study how plasticity manifests in a population at high-risk for autism to inform etiology, especially communication difficulties. I also combine early brain measures with data-driven approaches to predict future outcomes and inform early intervention efforts.
Funding for this research program provided by:
HAPPE Software
About:
HAPPE (Gabard-Durnam et al., 2018) is open-source software for pre-processing EEG & ERP data.
I developed HAPPE with my colleagues to address an urgent need in the developmental neuroimaging community for standardized, automatable processing approaches that perform well with acquisition constraints and artifact levels in developmental and patient populations.
HAPPE continues to evolve:
We're currently validating HAPPE for nonlinear EEG analyses
HAPPE 2.0 coming September 2019
Got a functionality request? Let me know!
HAPPE at work:
Pierce et al., 2019 JAMA Pediatrics
Gabard-Durnam et al., 2019
Wilkinson et al., 2019 Autism Research
Bick et al., 2018 Biological Psychiatry
Naples et al., 2018 Autism Biomarkers Consortium for Clinical Trials
HAPPE & BEAPP:
You can also access HAPPE through BEAPP, our open-source platform for EEG analysis.
BEAPP (Levin et al., 2018) facilitates batch processing of EEG data.
HAPPE in BEAPP seamlessly integrates contemporary processing and analysis approaches.
Connect with me
Google Scholar
ResearchGate
Twitter
