معرفی
Dr. Linda Mayes is the Arnold Gesell Professor of Child Psychiatry, Pediatrics, and Psychology and Director of the Yale Child Study Center at Yale University. She also serves as Special Advisor to the Dean in the Yale School of Medicine and is a Distinguished Visiting Professor in psychology at Sewanee: The University of the South. Her academic appointments include Chair of the Child Study Center, Professor in the Department of Psychology, and Professor in Pediatrics.
Dr. Mayes's research focuses on stress-response and regulatory mechanisms in young children at both biological and psychosocial risk, with particular emphasis on the impact of prenatal substance use on children's long-term outcomes. Her work integrates perspectives from child development, behavioral neuroscience, psychophysiology, neurobiology, developmental psychopathology, and neurobehavioral teratology. She has made significant contributions to understanding how prenatal stimulant exposure affects the development of arousal regulatory systems and the relationship between dysfunctional emotional regulation and impaired prefrontal cortical function in young children.
Given her work with high-risk children, Dr. Mayes also focuses extensively on the impact of parenting on children's development, particularly how substance abuse affects reward and stress regulatory systems in new parents. With colleagues at the Yale Child Study Center, she studies the transition to parenthood and the neural circuitry of early parent-infant attachment using neuroimaging and electroencephalographic techniques. She has developed several intervention programs for parents, including the intensive home-based program called Minding the Baby and a group-based intervention called Parents First.
Dr. Mayes's research is highly multidisciplinary, blending basic science with clinical interventions across multiple fields including adult and child psychiatry, behavioral neuroscience, obstetrics, pediatrics, and neuropsychology. Her laboratory follows two longitudinal cohorts—one exposed to drugs prenatally (now in adolescence) and another cohort of preschool-aged children growing up in varying degrees of psychosocial adversity. She collaborates across numerous departments at Yale and with international partners in Israel, Great Britain, Canada, and Italy.
Dr. Mayes is also trained as an adult and child psychoanalyst and serves as chairman of the directorial team of the Anna Freud Centre in London. She coordinates the Center's programs on research and clinical services for infants and young children through the Harris Child Development Unit. She oversees a master's program in psychodynamic developmental neuroscience offered collaboratively between University College London and Yale School of Medicine.
- Doctor of Science (honoris causa) from University of the South (10/15/1994)
Dr. Mayes has mentored numerous students and researchers through her roles at Yale and has secured significant funding for her research on developmental outcomes, substance exposure, and parenting interventions. She leads the Developmental Electrophysiology Laboratory and is involved in multiple clinical trials including studies on pregnant women, cannabis exposure effects, and the Baby School Recruitment and Education Initiative.
Her work spans several important areas including the impact of prenatal drug abuse on developmental outcomes, the effects of economic adversity on children's inhibitory control systems, risk for substance abuse in adolescence, and the neural circuitry of attachment and parental care.
