Laura Stroud, PhD
STAR COBRE Director | Community Collaborative Core Director
Dr. Stroud is Director and Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Behavioral and Preventive Medicine and as Founding Director of the Maternal-Infant Studies Laboratory and the Child and Adolescent Stress Laboratories at The Miriam Hospital. In addition, she serves as a Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University. Dedicated to mentoring, Dr. Stroud co-directs the STAR T32 postdoctoral fellowship program focused on the impact of childhood stress, trauma, and resilience across the lifespan. Dr. Stroud’s research aims to inform interventions and policy to reduce intergenerational mechanisms of risk for stress, depression, and substance use. Her work involves a transdisciplinary framework incorporating biological and behavioral markers of risk to focus on two sensitive periods of development: the prenatal-infant transition and the adolescent/pubertal transition. Within the perinatal period, Dr. Stroud’s research has investigated biobehavioral pathways through which effects of maternal stress, substance use, and depression are transmitted to the fetus and infant. Within the adolescent period, Dr. Stroud’s research has investigated novel neural and neuroendocrine biomarkers of risk for adolescent depression. Dr. Stroud has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health since 2001 and has also been supported by several foundation and research career awards.
