Postdoctoral Fellow
Leah Somerville received her PhD in Psychological and Brain Sciences from Dartmouth College in the spring of 2008 and has since joined the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology as a postdoctoral fellow. Her primary research is focused on understanding how emotional and cognitive systems in the brain interact to elicit and control emotional feelings and behaviors. Dr. Somerville has examined these issues using functional neuroimaging, peripheral psychophysiology (e.g., skin conductance) and behavioral methods. She is particularly interested in studying the influence of factors that lead to biases in emotional processes, including past experiences and personality variables, and how they might relate to an individual’s risk for psychiatric illness. In her current work, she is using the human developmental timecourse as a tool with which to examine how these cortical and subcortical systems interact at varying levels of structural and functional maturity, and how an ‘imbalance’ in the maturity of these systems may leave adolescents vulnerable to negative mood, depression, and anxiety.
Dr. Somerville is also interested in identifying brain areas mediating interpersonal processes and social behavior. She has conducted neuroimaging experiments to examine the neural responses to accepting and rejecting social feedback cues, and plans to continue this work by assessing the development of complex social behavior (and its supporting neural circuitry) in adolescent populations.
This research is supported by a K99R00 Pathway to Independence Award (PI: Somerville) from the National Institute of Mental Health (K99MH087813 Development of tonic and phasic neural systems mediating affect and anxiety). Abstract
Leah will be joining the Department of Psychology at Harvard University in July, 2012 and is currently accepting applications for the PhD program. Please send research assistant and postdoctoral inquiries by email.
Curriculum Vitae