Current Projects

The SNUGL Study

The Sleeping Newborns: Understanding Growth and Learning (SNUGL) Study is designed to further our understanding of how sleep, emotions, and behavior change during pregnancy and during the first year of a baby’s life.
We are interested in understanding whether it is possible to identify babies who may show signs of emotional or behavioral problems as early as their first birthday. Disrupted sleep can affect emotions, behaviors, and academic achievement in older children. However, little is known about how infant sleep develops and whether poor sleep might increase risk for problems with attention and behavior in early toddlerhood.

The BABY Study

The goal of the Baby Affect and Behavior (BABY) Study is to advance the science and technology of prenatal programing research by (1) identifying mothers with the full range of emotional distress and carefully characterizing maternal stress reactivity (e.g., autonomic and neuroendocrine) in a laboratory assessment; and (2) developing a novel, hypothesis-driven assay to assess epigenetic processes within a network of genes. When the aims of this project are realized we will have an improved understanding of early outcomes for infants of dysregulated mothers. We will also have created a novel assay, which will promote rapid replication as well as new investigations of stress-related epigenetic marks.