Principal Investigator
Canan Karatekin, Ph.D. 
Canan Karatekin is an associate professor at the Institute of Child Development. She has a BA in Psychology from Harvard College, and a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from UCLA. She studied cognitive impairments in children with youth-onset psychosis or ADHD for many years. However, in 5/2011, she decided to shift her research focus to the child welfare system and later broadened her area to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). In recent years, she has broadened her interests even more, to structural determinants of health and health inequities, and to the forces in society that shape those determinants.
Bria Gresham
Bria Gresham is a fifth-year PhD student in the Institute of Child Development’s Developmental Psychology program on the Developmental Science track and a Population Studies Predoctoral Trainee. Bria’s research is centered around neighborhood and community health, including the upstream causes and downstream impacts of neighborhood adversity. She is running a project examining the role of community violence exposure on mental and physiological functioning.
Frederique Corcoran
Frederique (Freddie) Corcoran is a 4th year Developmental Psychology PhD Candidate at the Institute of Child Development. Her research interests focus on multi-system resilience in children affected by adversity, and other racial, ethnic and income inequities (e.g., parental incarceration, homelessness, foster care). Specifically, she is interested in the intersection between mass incarceration and child development, including resources, programs and policies that have public health effects for families affected by incarceration.
Rachel Kritzik
Rachel Kritzik is a third-year Developmental Psychopathology and Clinical Science student at the Institute of Child Development. Her research interests generally concern how policies and structures affect child health and wellbeing within a social determinants of health framework. Her interests span understanding the long term effects of early childhood education, supporting children involved in the child welfare system, and preventing child firearm mortality.
Others in the research group include…
Sara Davis, a part of the group since Spring 2021, is an undergraduate majoring in Education and Political Science. Unnati Khanna, an MA student in clinical psychology, joins us every week by Zoom from Delhi, India. Other undergraduates in the group include Anna Voronkova, Ella Narowski, Anisakhon Karimova, Samantha Daddi, Annika Mellum, Arianna Hawkins, Lucy Rycyzyn, Malini Sundar, and Amanda Swenson. We also have a long-standing collaboration with Dr. Susan Mason in the School of Public Health and Dr. Andrew Barnes in the Department of Pediatrics. We are also currently collaborating with Dr. Angie Fertig on a case study of the Child Tax Credit in Minnesota.