The primary career development goal of this proposal is to provide the candidate with additional supervised experience and training in order to become an independent patient-oriented scientist. Through a multidisciplinary didactic structured training program, the candidate will obtain the basic knowledge and research skills necessary for an independent research career in child mental health. The candidate will participate in graduate course work in the School of Medicine Departments of Physiology, Radiology, Neuroscience and Health Care Policy and Research. The primary research goal is to conduct a project that will focus on the candidate's academic interest: the effects of environmental stress on the developing brain. Through this project, the candidate also will acquire experience in advanced research methods that will be necessary for an independent academic career in the future. Through the study of traumatic stress, such as child maltreatment, on early development the candidate will shed light into the dynamic mechanisms that occur in early development and that shape later behavior. Accordingly, an important objective of the proposed research project is to become knowledgeable and skilled in the field of functional neuroanatomy as a means to integrate prior and current leading methodologies in the field of traumatic stress. To this effect, the proposed research project has the following specific aims: a) to improve our understanding of neurobehavioral and cognitive outcome in children at risk for PTSD; b) to elucidate the role of the limbic-hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (LHPA) axis in the pathogenesis of PTSD; c) to enhance our knowledge of the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) in pediatric PTSD; and d) to utilize functional brain imaging in children with PTSD to identify the specific neurofunctional systems underlying associated cognitive and behavioral abnormalities.
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