About this session

Friday, 4:40 PM - 6:10 PM

Recent Advances in Community-Engaged Developmental Neuroscience: Three Stories of Process and Outcomes

Developmental neuroscience is overwhelmingly investigator-driven. Research questions, methods, and protocols are often developed with little input from the populations under study. Such distanced perspectives (Nzinga et al., 2018) risk perpetuating long-standing biases in the sociodemographic representation of study samples. Community-based participatory research (CBPR), long implemented in public health and other social sciences, “switches the script” by including community members, researchers, and other parties as equal partners in the research process (La Scala et al., 2023; Gard et al., 2022). However, CBPR has scarcely been implemented in developmental neuroscience. This symposium will present the results of three projects that leverage CBPR methods to study child and adolescent neurodevelopment. Speakers spanning early career to established investigator will discuss the process, outcomes, and challenges of integrating CBPR into developmental neuroscience. Speaker one will present the results of a multi-year project wherein the research questions and protocol were developed with youth and adult community advisory boards in Washington DC. Speaker two will present data from a longitudinal study on the social determinants of mental health co-created with Latina girls and their caregivers in Southern California. Speaker three will present a two-part study in which a novel fMRI task was co-created with a youth advisory board to explore the neurobehavioral correlates of digital social influence. An esteemed clinical-community psychologist and leader in conducting community-engaged research with adolescents will moderate a discussion focused on how best practices and lessons learned from existing implementations of CBPR can be leveraged to create authentic community-academic partnerships in developmental neuroscience.

Paper #1
Title	Co-creating programmatic developmental neuroscience research with communities: The impact of ethnic-racial discrimination on child anxiety
Presenting author	Kalina J. Michalska, Ph.D., University of California, Riverside, United States

Paper #2
Title	Examining digital social influence among adolescents: a mixed-methods approach combining neuroimaging and participatory research practices
Presenting author	Maria Maza, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, United States

Paper #3
Title	The CARE Project: A Community-Driven Study of Environmental Effects on Health and Wellbeing across Development
Presenting author	Dr. Arianna Gard, Ph.D., University of Maryland, College Park, United States

View all paper details

Session chair
Dr. Arianna Gard, Ph.D., University of Maryland, College Park, United States

Discussant
Dr. Noelle Hurd, Ph.D., University of Virginia, United States

⇦ Back to schedule