Tiffany Ho, PhD
University of California, Los Angeles
Dr. Tiffany Ho is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at UCLA and director of the Cognition, Affect, and Neurodevelopment in Youth (CANDY) Lab. The goal of the lab is to understand the neuroscience of adolescent stress and depression that are informed by principles of affective and developmental science. Dr. Ho specializes in using multimodal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques to characterize frontolimbic circuitry in adolescents and is currently focused on understanding stress-related biomarkers in predicting treatment response to antidepressants.
Pubertal influences and white matter microstructural development in adolescents: implications for mental health
Adolescence, the transition between childhood and adulthood, is characterized by rapid brain development in white matter (WM) that is attributed in part to rising levels in adrenal and gonadal hormones. Adolescence is also a time when mental health symptoms often emerge. The extent to which pubertal hormones explain WM development and, in turn, risk for mental disorders is unclear. In this talk, Dr. Ho will present work linking pubertal hormones with WM microstructure and mental health symptoms from a longitudinal study of boys and girls who were matched on pubertal development. Dr. Ho will also synthesize these results with her recent review on human and non-human studies that examine associations between hormonal changes and morphological properties of WM across species. Dr. Ho will end with an overview of future directions of the neuroscience of puberty and ways to promote forward and backward translation across model organisms.