While all children and adolescents experience stress, it is only for some youth that stress is biologically embedded, or ‘gets under the skin’, in ways that impact long-term wellbeing. This raises several critical questions, each of which guides interwoven lines of work comprising my program of research.

First, I aim to identify the mechanisms through which stress impacts mental and physical health through the identification of individual differences in social and cognitive factors linked to the dysregulation of developing biological systems.

Second, I extend this work to understand for whom the biological embedding of stress occurs: this line of research focuses primarily on associations between experiences of early life adversity and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, which plays an important role in transducing social experiences into physiological changes.

Third, I am dedicated to identifying how stress gets ‘under the skin’ to impact mental and physical health through the integration of multiple biomarkers, which acknowledges the interconnected nature of biological systems and connects biology with behavior.

My research is driven by a desire to bring us closer to understanding the mechanisms, the individuals, and the pathways through which stress is embedded to impact long-term wellbeing. Regarding translational aims, my work offers tangible targets for intervention efforts (e.g., loneliness, cognitive bias) that have the potential to attenuate mental and physical health problems across the lifespan. My work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, Journal of Affective Disorders, Psychoneuroendocrinology, and Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology.

I hold a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of British Columbia, an M.A. in Clinical Psychology from the University of British Columbia, and a B.A. (Hons) in Psychology and Philosophy from Queen’s University (Canada).