Join us for the upcoming Shaw Scholar Series talk featuring Dr. Greg Miller, Louis W. Menk Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University.
Dr. Miller’s research explores the ways in which stress affects long-term health, with a specific focus on how early-life stressors become biologically embedded across the lifespan. By bridging theories and methods from across the behavioral and biomedical sciences, his lab seeks to build a comprehensive understanding of stress-health connections.
Talk Details
Title: Toward a Mechanistic Understanding of the Long-Term Health Consequences of Financial Hardship in Childhood
Abstract: Children exposed to financial hardship show increased vulnerability to health problems across the lifecourse. These problems span the continuum of traditional mental and physical illnesses, including depression, post-traumatic stress, substance abuse, cardiovascular disease, and certain cancers. These findings raise key mechanistic questions: How does adversity “get under the skin” of a developing child? Through what pathways does it confer vulnerability to such a broad array of conditions? And why are some children protected while others remain vulnerable?
In this lecture, Dr. Miller will address these questions around three major research themes:
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Biological Embedding: How early adversity alters cells of the innate immune system to instantiate a pro-inflammatory phenotype.
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Brain-Immune Crosstalk: How this phenotype emerges from excessive communication between the innate immune system and brain circuits involved in threat and reward processing.
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Buffering Effects: How nurturant parenting can offset many of the biological and health risks associated with early adversity.
We look forward to seeing you there!
Originally published at veldmanclinic.nd.edu.