Yoko Nomura
CUNY Queens College, NY·Psychology
Stress during pregnancy can shape a child's mental health for years. When a pregnant woman goes through a major disaster, does that experience change how her child handles fear, emotions and impulses later on?
- Fields
Psychology
Public Health & Epidemiology
Neuroscience
- Topics
prenatal stress
in utero exposure
Superstorm Sandy
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jun 2028
What they work on
- Examine how prenatal Superstorm Sandy stress and postnatal stress, including parenting and normal life stress, affect neurodevelopment in children aged 9 to 13, using behavioral, physiological and neuropsychological assessments.
- Relate placental epigenetic signatures, especially in HPA stress-axis and immune genes, to later anxiety, disruptive behavior and executive function, by profiling chromatin accessibility and RNA expression in stored placentas.
- Test whether stress in the womb amplifies ("double-hit") or buffers ("stress inoculation") the effects of later stress, including COVID-19 stress, on anxiety and disruptive behavior, and how sex and socioeconomic status shape these effects.
- Use brain imaging and ABCD study tasks to test whether limbic-frontal circuits for threat response and cognitive control (RDoC systems) link prenatal Sandy exposure to child anxiety and disruptive behavior.
- Build predictive models of adolescent threat-response and cognitive-control outcomes from biological samples, such as hair, and behavioral data collected from pregnancy through the child's first decade.
More about the research
Can it raise the child's risk of anxiety, behavior problems or substance use? Hurricane Superstorm Sandy struck New York in 2012. It exposed some pregnant women in an existing study to severe stress and spared others, largely by chance, which creates a natural experiment. Both projects follow the Stress in Pregnancy (SIP) cohort, a racially and financially diverse group of mothers and children tracked since pregnancy. The children are now 9 to 13 years old, the age around puberty when risk-taking behavior and emotional problems often emerge.
Why it matters
Natural disasters such as hurricanes, wildfires and pandemics are becoming more common, so many pregnancies may be affected by severe stress. Tracing how this stress shapes children's brains and behavior could help identify at-risk children before psychiatric or substance use disorders begin. Placental epigenetic signatures may serve as early warning markers. The findings could guide when and how to intervene to support mothers and children.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Epigenetic susceptibility of behavioral and addictive disorders during pre/pubescence after natural disaster exposures in-utero
NIH · Sep 2023 – Jun 2028
The Evolutionary Basis of the Developmental Course and Etiologies of Anxiety and Disruptive Behaviors during Early Adolescence
NIH · Aug 2023 – May 2028
Closest labs
Lauren Micalizzi
Brown University, RI·Psychology
Examine how parental alcohol use, measured partly with alcohol biosensors that detect drinking, relates to changes in children's externalizing behavior during one month of intensive day treatment.
Marisa Spann
Columbia University, NY·Neuroscience·Early-career
Test whether maternal inflammation (IL-6) and infection (total immunoglobulin G) during pregnancy relate to salience network connectivity, using fetal MRI at 33–36 weeks and infant MRI at 2–6 weeks and 4 months.
Cynthia Munro
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Neuroscience
Determine how cortisol response to acute stress, induced with the Trier Social Stress Test and measured in saliva, relates to memory and executive-function performance after stress in people with mild cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer's disease.
The school
CUNY Queens College: 2 labs on PI Pages, $32M a year on research.
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