ESI Biosketches

12th NIH Matilda White Riley Behavioral and Social Sciences Honors - June 6, 2019
Early Stage Investigator Awardee Biographies

JAMIE L. HANSON, PH.D.(unable to present on June 6, 2019)
jamie.hanson@pitt.edu
Assistant Professor, Psychology
University of Pittsburgh

A family focused intervention influences hippocampal-prefrontal connectivity through gains in self-regulation.

Dr. Hanson is unable to present due to a concurrent presentation at an international research conference. Dr. Hanson’s research focuses on the neural circuitry children and adolescents use to learn about different aspects of their environment, how such circuits are shaped by early life stress (such as child poverty or maltreatment), and why neural changes due to this stress confer risks for negative outcomes. Jamie is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh and a Research Scientist at the Learning Research & Development Center. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in a degree program combining the fields of child development, stress neurobiology, and social neuroscience. More recently, Hanson was a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Hanson’s primary goal is to increase knowledge about the neurobiological effects of early life stress, with the hope that such information could aid in predicting and preventing stress-related, negative outcomes in education and mental health.

TAYLOR HARGROVE, PH.D.
thargrov@email.unc.edu
Assistant Professor, Sociology
Faculty Fellow, Carolina Population Center
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Intersecting social inequalities and body mass index trajectories from adolescence to early adulthood.

Dr. Hargrove's research program examines how and why social inequalities in health unfold across the life course, focusing on racial/ethnic, skin color, gender, and socioeconomic disparities. She is currently engaged in research that explores linkages among neighborhood contexts, individual-level characteristics, and biological measures of health in early adulthood. The goal of this work is to elucidate how macro-level environments shape the relationships among social statuses and more proximate causes of poor health. One project, for example, seeks to explore the biological and social mechanisms that may diminish the health benefits of socioeconomic resources for particular social groups in the US. Another project investigates how neighborhood racial composition interacts with race and skin color to influence individual-level physiological and psychological health. Hargrove plans to continue this line of research in efforts to help elucidate the pathways through which social factors "get under our skin" to shape health and undergird social stratification.

JUNGEUN OLIVIA LEE, PH.D.
lee363@usc.edu
Assistant Professor of Social Work Department of Children Youth and Families
University of Southern California

Developmental pathways from parental socioeconomic status to adolescent substance use: Alternative and complementary reinforcement.

Dr. Lee seeks to disentangle a complex relationship among socioeconomic status, adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), and behavior health, particularly substance use and its comorbid mental health, during the life course and across generations. Conceptually anchored in the life course perspective, Dr. Lee’s research focuses on (a) the impacts of socioeconomic status, both at individual- and neighborhood levels, on problematic substance use and their underlying mechanisms; (b) associated gender differences; and (c) the intergenerational impacts of parental substance use, socioeconomic status, and ACEs on children. She is currently principal investigator for a grant funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The study seeks to identify developmental timing and dynamic changes in maternal substance use and socioeconomic status among low-income young mothers, link them to child developmental outcomes, and then link those back to maternal exposure to ACEs.

MARCO VENNIRO, PH.D.
venniro.marco@nih.gov
Center on Compulsive Behavior (CCB) Postdoctoral Research Fellow
National Institute on Drug Abuse

Volitional social interaction prevents drug addiction in rat models

Marco is a CCB Fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Yavin Shaham at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). He is interested in behavior and translational research with a focus on the social component of neuropsychiatric disorders. Marco received a Ph.D. in pharmacology from the University of Palermo in 2012. Subsequently, he was invited to participate in the NIH Graduate Partnership Program. Following a 2-year fellowship at NIDA, he received his Ph.D. in translational biomedicine from the University of Verona in 2016. Marco’s research examining the influence of alternative rewards on behaviors related to drug addiction has been published in Neuron and Nature Neuroscience. Because of the high impact of this work, Marco received the 2019 European Behavioral Pharmacology Society’s Young Investigator Award. Prior to this award, Marco has also been the recipient of the NIH Fellows Award for Research Excellence, and travel awards from EBPS, Winter Conference and CPDD.

ROBBEE WEDOW, PH.D.
rwedow@broadinstitute.org
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Fellow in Sociology, Harvard Department of Sociology

Education, smoking, and cohort change: Forwarding a multidimensional theory of the environmental moderation of genetic effects.

Dr. Wedow is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the Analytical and Translational Genetics Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital, the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, and the Department of Epidemiology in the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Using computational methods and traditional demographic methods, Robbee’s work sits at the intersection of sociology, demography, and statistical genetics. He focuses especially on the environmental and genetic etiologies of complex human social behaviors like educational attainment, risk-taking behavior, smoking and drinking behaviors, and sexual orientation. You can find out more about Robbee’s work at robbeewedow.com.