Leigha MacNeill

Leigha MacNeill serves as Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Science within Purdue University’s College of Health and Human Sciences, where she integrates family systems and biological perspectives to investigate early childhood self-regulation and mental health development through translational research.

Her educational foundation includes:

• Ph.D. in Psychology (2019, Pennsylvania State University)
• M.S. in Psychology (2016, Pennsylvania State University)
• B.A. in Psychology (2012, University of Rochester)

Dr. MacNeill’s research emphasizes social-emotional development, temperament regulation, and early mental health risk prediction using autonomic physiology, eye-tracking, and family interaction analysis. She adopts a strengths-based framework to identify resilience pathways while developing tools for pediatric primary care and school settings, with particular focus on contextualized irritability assessment as a transdiagnostic marker.

Her 2023-2025 publications reveal a concentrated effort in developing and validating mental health risk calculators for young children, combining neuroimaging, mobile eye-tracking, and longitudinal modeling to create culturally meaningful screening tools applicable in real-world clinical contexts.

Scientific recognition includes:

• NIH Loan Repayment Program Award (L40MH121108)

She leads the NIH-funded SHINE Lab while serving as Principal Investigator on the $100,000 Loan Repayment Program Award and Co-Investigator on a $7.45M NIMH R01 grant, actively recruiting graduate students for developmental health research. Her teaching includes HDFS 305: Biosocial Foundations of the Family.

The Social-emotional Health In Nurturing Environments (SHINE) Lab employs innovative methodologies like passive ECG bio-sensing and naturalistic observation to study biobehavioral mechanisms underlying child mental health, with recent work focusing on pandemic stress impacts and just-in-time intervention development.