August 5, 2025
Dana Tudorascu, a faculty member with SCI's Intelligent Systems Program and an associate professor in the School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry, is a collaborator on a Pitt research team recently awarded funding by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The NIH funding supports the team's work in studying how early life adversity can impact emotions and brain development in adolescents and young teens. The research will use different brain imaging tasks and smartphone-based tracking to understand how adverse childhood experiences affect brain circuits involved in positive emotions and depression risk. The study focuses on positive emotions rather than just negative ones and measures emotional responses as they unfold over time both in the lab and in daily life.