Current Studies
What we’re working on now
From a new statewide twin cohort to national longitudinal datasets, our active projects trace how environment and behavior shape the brain across development.
Enrolling Studies
The Vanderbilt University Twin Research Center (VUTRC)
Our lab is currently in the process of assembling a representative cohort of adolescent and young-adult twins in the state of Tennessee. These participants will power our lab’s original data-collection efforts, including projects that combine twin methods with high-frequency data collection to better understand causal relationships between the brain, psychosocial stress, and substance use.
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Ongoing research
Using longitudinal twin studies to test whether substance use causally affects the brain
We analyze data from multiple longitudinal twin studies nationwide to ask how long-term alcohol, cannabis, and nicotine use relate to brain health — and, using co-twin comparisons, whether those relationships are causal. Our work to date finds little evidence that adolescent cannabis use, by itself, causes lasting harm to mental health or cognition, though frequent use was associated with lower educational attainment.
Pathways connecting childhood socioeconomic disadvantage to later-life substance use
Early socioeconomic disadvantage reliably predicts increased substance-use risk in adolescence and adulthood. This project identifies the environmental factors linking disadvantage to later substance use, using co-twin comparisons to separate environmental pathways from the genetic and familial factors relatives share.
Enduring mental health
Research suggests only about 1 in 6 people reach midlife without ever meeting criteria for a mental-health disorder. We study the minority with “enduring mental health” to understand how long-term mental health is maintained — paralleling centenarian research on the mechanisms of healthy aging.