Assaf Oshri
University of Georgia, GA·Psychology
Children who experience adversity early in life, such as threats, deprivation or unpredictable home lives, are at higher risk of using and misusing drugs as teenagers. But many do not, and the reasons lie partly in the brain and partly in children's families, peers, schools and communities.
- Fields
Psychology
Neuroscience
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
early life adversity
adverse childhood experiences
adolescent drug use
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- Test whether changes in functional connectivity between cognitive control networks and emotion, reward and salience networks explain how early life adversity leads to drug-use vulnerability and drug use, using ABCD Study data on 11,883 youth.
- Examine whether family, peer, school, community and developmental contexts moderate the brain processes linking adversity to adolescent drug-use vulnerability, using multilevel latent change models of imaging and behavioral data.
- Assess how threat, deprivation and unpredictability affect cognitive control of emotion and reward networks in 265 low-income rural Georgia children followed from ages 7 to 10 with fMRI.
- Test whether neural risk markers carry the effect of adversity onward to drug-use vulnerability in rural children, and whether family, peer, school and community protective factors weaken these links.
More about the research
These projects follow a "dual system" idea. Brain networks for cognitive control (CCN) normally grow better at managing networks for emotion, reward and salience (ERSN), which flag what feels important or rewarding. An imbalance between these systems may weaken self-control and raise drug-use risk. Combining brain imaging with detailed measures of children's environments, two studies test how adversity shapes these networks and which surroundings protect children.
Why it matters
Findings could help public health programs design prevention and intervention efforts that blunt the effect of childhood adversity on teen drug use. Low-income rural children are a group whose protective factors are poorly understood, and the work could guide programs for them in particular. It may also show whether brain-based markers can support earlier, more accurate identification of youth at risk for addiction.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
A Neuroecological Approach to Examining the Effects of Early Life Adversity on Adolescent Drug Use Vulnerabilities Using the ABCD Dataset
NIH · Sep 2023 – Jul 2028
Early Adversity and Drug Use Vulnerability Among Low Income Rural Children: Testing a Neuro-ecological Model of Resilience
NIH · Apr 2023 – Jan 2028
Closest labs
Erin Thompson
Florida International University, FL·Psychology·Early-career
Examine how exclusionary school discipline, such as suspension, relates to adolescent mental health and substance use in the ABCD Study, accounting for neighborhood, school, behavioral and socioeconomic factors.
Pamela Madden
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Psychology
Follow and assess children enrolled at the Washington University site of the ABCD Study with brain imaging, cognitive testing, bioassays and health interviews every two years from age 9–10 into young adulthood.
Chandra Sripada
University of Michigan, MI·Neuroscience
Test whether reduced efficiency of evidence accumulation in bipolar disorder comes from weaker flexible rewiring of brain networks, comparing 130 patients and 130 healthy adults with behavioral tasks and task-based neuroimaging.
The school
University of Georgia: 27 labs on PI Pages, $628M a year on research, 598 research doctorates a year.
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