Congratulations to CNLM Fellow, Kristina Uban, final recipient of UCI’s Conte Center’s 2021 Seed Grant

Health, Society & Behavior's Assistant Professor, Kristina Uban, is the recent recipient of UCI's Conte Center's Seed grant for 2021-2022. The funded proposal is an exploratory research project entitled, "Identification of Leading Early Life Factors Associated with Brain Maturation in Targeted Neurocircuitries". Public Health's PhD candidate, Vida Rebello, is leading the statistical analyses for this project that leverages a large database from US-based adolescents as part of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) cohort study. "Our team proposed to identify novel patterns among rates of brain and hormone maturation alongside antecedent life factors in adolescents as they undergo pubertal maturation: a hallmark of mammalian development", says Assistant Professor Kristina Uban. "Our Developing Brain Laboratory team is excited, as this seed grant allows us to have some fun by applying a data reduction approach to a large data set, with aims to discover novel ways for how the larger environment shapes typical human development. Some of the leading antecedent factors we are interested in exploring include risk versus resilience factors, such as early life adversity, economic resilience factors, parental mental health and perinatal health".