Rachel Marsh, PhD
Columbia University
Dr. Rachel Marsh is the Irving Philips Professor of Medical Psychology (in Child Psychiatry) at Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC) where she directs the Cognitive Development and Neuroimaging Laboratory. She also directs Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) research at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and co-directs the NIMH-funded T32 postdoctoral training program in translational research in child psychiatry at Columbia University. A native New Yorker, Dr. Marsh received her Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the City University of New York and completed her postdoctoral training at Columbia University. Dr. Marsh’s research involves the application of multimodal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques, behavioral and clinical measures to the investigation of brain-behavior relationships in normal development and in the development of psychiatric disorders that arise during childhood and adolescence. Dr. Marsh’s lab studies self-regulatory control processes and how they change over development and following the remission of symptoms with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in children and adults with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Her work also seeks to identify neural predictors of developmental changes in regulatory processes and treatment response in young children. Most recently, research in Dr. Marsh’s lab has taken a dyadic approach to understanding child development with one NIMH funded study aimed at studying the intergenerational transmission of regulatory deficits from mother to child and another aimed at understanding the effects of prenatal SARS-CoV-2 on brain-behavioral indices of socioemotional functioning in mother-infant dyads. This latter study capitalizes on the COVID-19 Mother Baby Outcome (COMBO) initiative, a large multidisciplinary collaborative that was established at CUIMC to follow SARS-CoV-2 exposed laboring mothers and their newborns and compare their long-term health outcomes to case-matched dyads without prenatal exposure.
The Intergenerational Transmission of Control Deficits
Disturbances in the maturation of self-regulatory control processes contribute to the development of various psychiatric disorders in which children have difficulty regulating their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. This presentation will describe findings from studies in which we took a dyadic approach to understanding the development of deficits in self-regulatory control. In one study, multi-modal MRI data were acquired from 61 mother-child dyads enrolled in an ongoing study. Analyses included usable data from 38 children (mean age=7.51; SD=1.02) and 43 mothers (31.35; SD=6.22). Mothers self-reported on their mental health and their child’s internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Findings revealed that the structure and function of their control circuits mediated the relationship between maternal stress and child internalizing symptoms. in In another study, MRI data was collected from 108 women who gave birth during the pandemic. Preliminary findings suggest that the integrity of control circuits mediates the relationship between their perceived stress and child competence and attention at 24 months of age. These findings point to the importance of studying mother-child dyads to identify the development of control deficits.