Preschool anxiety disorders predict different patterns of amygdala-prefrontal connectivity at school-age.

Dr. Kimberly Carpenter is a clinical neuroscientist specializing in understanding complex brain-behavior relationships in young children with autism and associated disorders. Her program of research includes four interrelated research themes: (1) Understanding the impact of comorbid disorders on clinical and behavioral outcomes of young autistic children; (2) Identification of early risk factors for the development of psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders; (3) Identification of brain-based biomarkers for group stratification and treatment response tracking in young children; and (4) Improving methods for screening, early identification, and treatment monitoring in autism and associated disorders. She currently leads an innovative research program exploring the shared and unique impacts that co-occurring anxiety and ADHD have on brain and behavioral biomarkers in young autistic children. She was the first to demonstrate that sensory over-responsivity, a symptom that has been described as part of a number of disorders including autism, anxiety, and ADHD, is a specific and unidirectional risk factor for the development of anxiety disorders in young children. She was also the first to demonstrate that, when accounting for comorbidity among individual anxiety disorders, specific anxiety disorders are associated with phenotypically meaningful differences in brain connectivity using MRI. Dr. Carpenter has also collaborated with experts in early childhood mental health, computer science, and engineering to develop novel technologies that utilize multi-modal methods via computer vision and machine learning to develop, refine, and test novel screening tools for early identification and treatment monitoring in young children with autism and related disorders.

Developmental epidemiology seeks to apply developmental and epidemiological principles to the study of psychopathology. Within this overall framework, my main research interests relate to the study of depression, anxiety, and disruptive behavior disorders and their effects on service use in children and adolescents. Current activities include studies of (1) relationships among pubertal hormonal changes, morphological changes, life strain, and psychopathology; (2) the development of measures of psychopathology and their links with psychiatric nosology (at the levels of symptoms, diagnoses, and disability); (3) parental burden and service use resulting from child and adolescent psychopathology; (4) comorbidity among psychiatric disorders; (5) factors affecting mental health service use; and (7) psychological predictors of risk for cardiovascular disorders in adolescence.

The research in our lab is concerned with advancing structural and functional MRI methodologies (e.g. fast and high-resolution imaging techniques) for human brain imaging. We also aim to improve our understanding of functional brain signals, including spatiotemporal characterizations of the blood oxygenation level dependent contrast and alternative contrast mechanisms that are more directly linked to the neuronal activities. Additional effort is invested in applying and validating the developed methods to study human functional neuroanatomy.