DATE: Thursday, November 17th TIME: 12:15 – 1:45pm ROOM: 4E26 of SSW Bldg. 525 W. Redwood Street, Baltimore, MD 21201 **Pizza and refreshments will be provided** please RSVP by 11/15 to jcanapp@ssw.umaryland.edu Presentation Topic: Understanding Child Abuse From Neurobiology to Social Policy Joan Kaufman, Ph.D. is Director of Research at the Center for Child and Family Traumatic Stress at Kennedy Krieger Institute. She also holds appointments in the Department of Psychiatry and the School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Kaufman’s research focuses on two areas of investigation: 1) Research on risk and resilience in maltreated children; and 2) Child psychiatric assessment and studies in support of the National Institute of Mental Health’s Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) initiative which aims to develop the necessary database to derive a new psychiatric nomenclature informed by neuroscience, genetics, and psychology. These two lines of research are synergistic and interrelated, with the study of maltreated individuals having a number of advantages for the RDoC project, including: the study of a subset of patients that are frequently treatment resistant to standard clinical interventions; examination of a relatively homogenous sample with the onset of psychopathology proposed to be associated with stress-related mechanisms; and well-established relevant animal models to facilitate translational research. Our investigations utilize clinical assessment, neuroimaging (e.g., structural, fMRI fear conditioning paradigm, resting state connectivity), and genetics (e.g., polymorphisms, epigenetic markers) research methods, with the goal of understanding the effects of early adversity on later development and factors that modify outcomes. Our program of research with maltreated children is broad, with a focus that spans from neurobiology to social policy.