Project Description
Candice Odgers is a newly elected member of the Child Brain & Development Program sponsored by the Canadian Institutes for Advanced Research (CIFAR). This award supports new and innovative research related to the goals of the Program led by Odgers and her research team.
Project Goals
- Researchers with the program in Child & Brain Development want to know how adversity and enrichment in early childhood affect mental, physical and emotional health throughout a lifetime, and how the problems caused by early adversity can be abated or reversed. This program has led the way in moving beyond the debate about “nature vs. nurture,” and instead has helped establish that it is interactions among genes and environments during early childhood that guide human development.
- The program examines the neurobiological mechanisms that are governed by those gene-environment interactions and how they determine individual differences in children’s development and health.
- Researchers are also concerned with the larger societal differences in outcomes when children grow up in poverty and when they are reared in more supportive, sustaining environments.