The research of the Fundamentals of the Adolescent Brain (FAB) Lab examines the development, neural correlates and disruption of cognitive abilities in psychiatric disorders. Our primary focus is on the adolescent brain and the implications of our discoveries for the treatment of young people in medicine and in our justice system.
The Fundamentals of the Adolescent Brain (FAB) Lab moved to Barnard College-Columbia University from Yale University in 2022. Our science focuses on the neural correlates of cognitive processes across different ages, species, and emotional and social contexts to ultimately inform legal, social and medical policies. The adolescent brain has received a lot of media coverage with advances in brain imaging techniques that provide a voyeuristic opportunity for us to look under the hood of the behaving adolescent brain. These methods together with sophisticated animal studies are providing new insights as to why adolescents experience and respond to the world in unique ways. Rather than depicting the adolescent brain as defective, our research paints a picture of a brain that is sculpted by both biological and experiential factors to adapt to the unique social, physical, sexual and intellectual challenges of adolescence. Specifically we are interested in which situations lead to diminished cognitive control and which lead to adaptive behavior and how adaptation will vary by one’s environment (e.g., threatening or safe). Specific questions driving our science include: When does the capacity for self control mature? How do social and emotional contexts impact this capacity? How do changes in neural circuitry help to explain changes in cognitive abilities across development? Are these changes observed in other species and if so, how might they be evolutionarily adaptive and when do they become maladaptive?
See publications: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=OQQzJnsAAAAJ&hl=en
Our Values
The FAB Lab promotes and embraces a supportive, respectful, and open-minded climate free of harassment and unfair treatment. We do not tolerate bias-motivated actions or discriminatory behaviors towards groups based on social identities including race, ethnicity, country of origin, religion, gender identity/expression, sexual orientation, age, or (dis)ability status.