Statement of Purpose Essay - Columbia University

My past and present experiences have coalesced in my resolve to become a professor and principal investigator at the helm of an interdisciplinary research program elucidating the biopsychosocial mechanisms through which stress influences the emergence and outcomes of individual differences in emotional processes during childhood and adolescence. I seek to examine how childhood stressors impact the interplay among social contexts, neurobiological functioning, and emotional development within a developmental affective neuroscience framework. I strive to use multi-modal methods that allow neuroimaging, physiological, and behavioral assessment paradigms to predict emotional experiences and regulation in the natural environment, and in turn, to examine how these daily emotional processes influence long-term risk and resilience for psychopathology. The psychology doctoral program at Columbia University offers the ideal setting to achieve these professional objectives. My undergraduate education and post-baccalaureate experiences solidified my desire to pursue a research career in psychological science and strengthened my foundation of essential research skills. I became adept at participant recruitment, data collection and entry, administration of psycho-diagnostic interviews, and literature synthesis through my independent research as an undergraduate and Fulbright Scholar and my research assistantship coordinating randomized controlled trials evaluating eating disorder and obesity interventions in youth. My research findings and clinical observations illuminated the central role of negative affect in the exacerbation of pediatric eating and weight problems, which marked the nascence of my long-standing passion for understanding emotional processes. Intent on expanding my training in developmental psychopathology and continuing research in pediatric disordered eating, I entered the Medical and Clinical Psychology doctoral program at the Uniformed Services University. I delved into advanced research tasks, such as writing first-author manuscripts, conducting statistics independently, and delivering scientific presentations. I bolstered my knowledge of biological processes through coursework in neuroscience and physiology. My exposure to the NIMH’s Research Domain Criteria framework further enhanced my desire to focus on characterizing core dimensions of emotional functioning across multiple units of analysis, from genetics and neural circuits to behavior and self-report. I merged these interests by adding the stop signal task and emotion regulation questionnaires into an fMRI study utilizing an anxiety-provoking peer chatroom task. This research suggested that loss of control eating in adolescent girls is characterized by low distress tolerance, poor inhibitory control, and a failure to engage prefrontal cortical regions implicated in cognitive control when anticipating peer evaluation and receiving peer rejection online. My other research efforts also investigated the roles of interpersonal stress and negative affect in pediatric disinhibited eating. Stemming from this work, I led efforts to propose a neurodevelopmental model hypothesizing that severe and chronic childhood stressors give rise to perturbations in corticolimbic circuitry and neuroendocrine stress response systems, which then enhances sensitivity to interpersonal stressors, exacerbates emotion dysregulation, and increases risk for internalizing problems and binge-type eating disorders during adolescence. This work captivated my interest in using neuroimaging, physiological, and behavioral methods to clarify how the experience of stressful events in childhood influences the development of emotion regulation and psychopathology during adolescence. After earning my masters degree, my graduate school activities were curtailed in the Fall of 2014 when I underwent major emergency surgery and took a medical leave of absence to recover from physical health complications. This period left time for reflection about my priorities and professional goals. I realized that my initial interest in pediatric disordered eating was replaced by a desire to understand the biopsychosocial mechanisms involved in emotional development and to elucidate how individual differences in emotional experiences and regulation impact psychopathology risk in youth. Significantly, I recognized that clinical training felt overly burdensome because it distracted from my emotion-focused research aspirations. Thus, I withdrew from my doctoral program to pursue this direction. I sought out a research associate position at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center where I have built upon my fervor for emotional development during adolescence. I have acquired critical research skills and knowledge in affective and developmental science as the project manager for a school-based prospective study examining predictors of anxiety and depression in ~1,500 early adolescents. I obtained proficiency in longitudinal statistical approaches through manuscript preparation. My research has examined psychosocial factors that confer risk and resilience for internalizing problems and evaluated the impact of internalizing problems on psychosocial adjustment across adolescence. I also was drawn to an ongoing daily diary study as a means of elucidating emotional processes with high ecological validity. I capitalized on the ability of these data to capture emotional dynamics by calculating each adolescent’s degree of affective reactivity to daily conflict and affective instability, and evaluating predictors of between-person differences in these emotion dysregulation indices. The findings suggested that emotion development models should consider positive aspects of temperament, coping, and parent-adolescent relationships, as trait resilience, problem-focused coping, support seeking, and mother-adolescent communication predicted individual differences in affective reactivity and instability. These experiences solidified my passion for understanding emotional processes and resiliency factors during adolescence, emphasized the merit of mastering quantitative methods, and spawned an interest in experience sampling designs. The psychology doctoral program at Columbia University provides an exceptional training environment to foster my research interests and gain the knowledge and skills necessary to develop a high impact research program focused on childhood stress, neurobiological bases of emotional development, and internalizing problems during adolescence. The program’s behavioral neuroscience concentration would allow me to gain a deeper understanding of brain structure and function and to acquire expertise in neuroimaging methods. Dr. Nim Tottenham would be an outstanding mentor, as her developmental affective neuroscience research program aligns closely with my desire to investigate the neural underpinnings of emotional development across childhood and adolescence and to examine how socio-environmental factors shape neurodevelopment and risk or resilience for psychopathology. I would be thrilled to assist with Dr. Tottenham’s study examining how diverse forms of early life adversity impact neural and emotional development. This study would provide an exceptional opportunity to learn about computational models and machine learning approaches for developmental affective neuroscience. Given my goal of investigating how behavioral and neurobiological functioning in the laboratory predicts daily emotional processes in the natural environment, Dr. Niall Bolger would provide invaluable guidance in how to implement experience sampling studies and analyze intensive longitudinal data. I plan to capitalize on coursework in advanced quantitative methods to provide the tools necessary to address novel research questions through data analysis. My research experience and skills, coupled with my determined focus, grit, and work ethic, position me to thrive at Columbia University as I work towards my goal of conducting high impact research that enhances our understanding of emotional development in youth and identify factors that optimize wellbeing in the face of adversity.