Across days and years, my team maps how adolescents (and parents) navigate stressors, seek support from those around them (including online), and move onto problematic vs. healthier trajectories at key developmental junctures. Across generations, we trace development to identify the mechanisms underlying mental health and wellbeing. Across the country, we harness emerging policy changes, including Australia's national social media ban, to identify putative causal impacts on young people and families.

The lab harnesses new technologies to investigate diverse pathways of risk, health, and wellbeing, with a focus on youth and families living in the context of structural and socio-economic disadvantage. We apply a lens across generations, years, days, and moments via longitudinal surveys, daily diaries, experience sampling, and passive sensing approaches. 

I currently lead a FHRI Distinguished Professoriate fellowship and an ARC-Discovery Project. Both address adolescent and family processes that shape mental health and emerging technologies' potential for reaching and supporting young people and their caregivers in everyday life. These build on three previous ARC Discovery awards, philanthropic support, and national and international research support which have underpinned a sustained program of research impact. 

My research is grounded in more than four years of frontline work with children and families at heightened risk for poor outcomes due to structural and socio-economic disadvantage. This includes working with very low income parents in rural Alaska through Head Start (the US federal school readiness program for families experiencing poverty), and three years working with court-ordered adolescents in intensive month-long wilderness rehabilitation programs in rural Florida through Outward Bound. These experiences shape the questions I ask, the populations I prioritise, and the science conducted within my lab, and in the Developmental Science of Mental Health Team at The Kids Research Institute, which I lead.

I trained in developmental and quantitative psychology at the University of Virginia (undergraduate), University of New Hampshire (PhD) and Arizona State University and its Prevention Research Center, REACH (NIMH-funded post-doctoral fellowship). In addition to a NIMH T32 fellowship with REACH in advanced quantitative methods and prevention science, I trained as a NIMH CHIPS (Child Health Intervention and Prevention Science) fellow in ambulatory assessment, including experience sampling, wearable technologies, and bio-marker methodologies.