Meet us

AMANDA LOWELL, PH.D
Associate Research Scientist
I study the impact of addiction and adversity on maternal neural and behavioral responses to infant cues, the implementation of evidence-based parenting intervention for mothers with addictions, and the neurophysiological mechanisms underscoring mothers’ response to treatment.
TAL YATZIV, PH.D
Postdoctoral Associate
I am interested in the interplay between cognitive and affective processes in shaping early parenting and infants’ socioemotional development, with special focus on parental mentalizing and sensitive responsiveness. I employ reaction-time and accuracy-based cognitive measures, imaging approaches, and observation-based ecological methods (e.g., videotaped parent-infant interactions), to gain insights into how adaptive parenting unfolds in time, and how psychopathology may modulate this transition.
FRANCESCA PENNER, PH.D
Postdoctoral Fellow
I am interested in parenting and child socio-emotional development and mental health. I am especially interested in understanding the influences of attachment, parental emotion regulation and mentalizing, and parent psychopathology at multiple levels of analysis, in order to improve parent interventions and reduce the intergenerational transmission of psychopathology.
WINNIE ORCHARD, PH.D
Postdoctoral Associate
I am a Postdoctoral Associate with a joint appointment at the BABL, and the Holmes Lab. I completed my PhD in Neuroscience at the Turner Institute of Brain and Mental Health at Monash University, in 2021, under the supervision of Dr Sharna Jamadar. My research investigates the structural and functional brain changes associated with parenthood across the lifespan, with a special interest in how these changes relate to parental cognition and mental health in the postpartum period. I am passionate about the parental brain, and women's health more broadly - how female biology and the experience of womanhood shape the brain, cognition and behavior across the life stages of adolescence, pregnancy, parenthood, peri-menopause and the aging process.
LILI MASSAC
NIDA Summer Research Intern