Brain/Behavior Relationships in the Developing Child

The long-range goal of this Center program is to understand how early biologic and environmental risks combine to affect the developing brain and associated behavioral systems.  

The distinguishing features of this research program are:

• A multidimensional focus that links neuroendocrinology, neurophysiology, neuroanatomy, and neurochemistry with mental, motor, and socioemotional functioning;
• Use of human studies and closely connected animal models to answer pressing questions about early brain and behavioral development; and
• Emphasis on biologic and environmental risks that disportionately affect children in poverty.

Barbara Felt is currently serving as interim director. Current CHGD research activities emphasize early development.   Issues of vulnerability and plasticity make infancy (beginning before birth) and early childhood an important, fascinating focus of research on brain-behavior relations.   The emphasis of the Brain and Behavior program at the Center is the intersection of environmental and biologic risks and compensatory mechanisms.   Center faculty members are conducting almost 30 research projects related to this program.   The research addresses such common early biologic risks as prematurity, hypoxia-ischemia, cerebral palsy, and Down syndrome.   Environmental risks such as maternal depression, perinatal steroids and iron deficiency, are studied in relation to the developing stress axis, neuroanatomy and neurochemistry, growth, maternal-infant interaction, and infant behavior and development.   Major recent achievements were the 2001 beginning of an NICHD-funded Program Project Grant, "Brain and Behavior in Early Iron Deficiency," and the NIMH-funded network grant "Perinatal Experience and Children's Mental Health" in 2003.   Both still continue.