Project Investigators
Dr. Kimberly Carpenter
Dr. Carpenter is a neurobiologist specializing in translational developmental neuroscience, with expertise in functional and structural neuroimaging in clinical and pediatric populations. Dr. Carpenter’s research focuses on three primary content areas: (A) The neuroscience of early childhood mental health, (B) Risk factors for psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders in preschool-age children, and (C) The development of new technologies for evidenced-based screening for neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders in young children. Through this work, she aims to increase access to, and provide a solid neurobiological foundation for, evidence-based screening, diagnosis and treatment of autism and associated psychiatric comorbidities in children from birth to 5 years of age.
Dr. Margaret Sheridan
Margaret Sheridan, Ph.D. received her degree in Clinical Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007. After completing her clinical internship at NYU Child Study Center/Bellevue Hospital, she spent three years as a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at Harvard School of Public Health and then as an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School. In 2015 she left HMS to become an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and serve as the director of the CIRCLE Lab (http://circlelab.unc.edu/). The goal of her research is to better understand the neural underpinnings of the development of cognitive control across childhood (from 5-18 years of age) and to understand how and why disruption in this process results in psychopathology.
Dr. William Copeland
I was trained as a clinical psychologist at the University of Vermont and then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in psychiatric epidemiology at Duke University Medical Center. As part of a NIMH K23 award and a NARSAD early-career investigator award, I received supplemental training in psychiatric genetics and biomarker analysis. Since then, I have been the PI or Co-I on grants from NIMH, NIDA, NICHD and the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation to support my work on the longitudinal, representative Great Smoky Mountains Study. I am also currently an investigator on the Duke Preschool Anxiety Study, the Fast Track Intervention Trial, the University of Vermont Wellness Study, and Project RAISE. Across all of these studies, my research program has focusing on understanding the development of emotional and behavior health across the lifespan. This work includes understanding the interplay between early adverse experiences and genetic vulnerability with other individual, family, and contextual characteristics.
Dr. Helen Egger
Helen Link Egger, MD, is chair of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the director of the Child Study Center at NYU Langone Medical Center. Dr. Egger is a former Board Member of ZERO TO THREE. Dr. Egger’s research program focuses on psychiatric disorders, particularly anxiety disorders in preschool children ages 2 through 5 years old. She has been a leader in the development of measures for assessing psychiatric symptoms and disorders in young children. Dr. Egger is lead author of the Preschool Age Psychiatric Assessment (PAPA), the first comprehensive structured parent interview for assessing psychiatric symptoms and disorders in preschool children.