Kohn, Brooke

Bio

Brooke is a doctoral student in the Clinical Psychology program working with Drs. Tracy Riggins and Lea Dougherty. She received her B.A. in Psychology, with a minor in English, from Kenyon College in 2018. While at Kenyon, she co-founded two programs aimed at increasing access to mental health services for college students and justice-involved youth in the surrounding community.

After graduation, Brooke served as a Research Coordinator at Boston Children's Hospital, where she worked on studies examining the neural, biological, and social underpinnings of autism spectrum disorder across the lifespan. In 2021, she joined Dr. Moriah Thomason's lab at New York University, studying the effects of perinatal stress, early adversity, and the COVID-19 pandemic on fetal and infant neurodevelopment.

Brooke joined Dr. Tracy Riggins' lab in 2021. Her graduate work has focused on risk and resilience in early development, with an emphasis on parenting, neurodevelopment, and the developmental origins of mental health. She is particularly interested in understanding how environmental predictability and stress shape caregiver-child relationships, neural development, and lifetime risk for disorders.

Brooke received an R36 dissertation grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to support her research on longitudinal patterns of comorbid perinatal depression and substance use involvement and their effects on infant brain development.

In addition to her graduate research, Brooke is actively involved in mentoring initiatives aimed at increasing access to psychology training and careers. She serves as a mentor for the national mentorship program, NexGen Psych Scholars (NPSP), and has received two Broadening Participation Initiative grants from the University of Maryland Department of Psychology to expand the department's involvement in the program.