Dr. Alexandra Sullivan

Postdoctoral Scholar

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. I am dedicated to uncovering how early-life stress affects children’s mental and physical health and discovering how effective parenting interventions can counteract these impacts.

To ask and answer these interdisciplinary questions, I draw from several scientific areas, such as developmental, health, clinical, and biological psychology research.

In addition to research on early-life stress exposure and parenting interventions, I also study maternal mental health, how stress effects cross generations, and what biomarkers can reveal about children’s exposure and response to adversity.

Areas of Interest

• I study how early-life stress gets “under the skin” (the biological embedding of stress) and impacts child health.

• I focus on how parents and psychosocial interventions that target parenting can protect children from the negative effects of stress exposure. This line of research includes investigating factors like maternal mental health. See this blog post for more info.

• I am particularly interested in what biomarkers can tell us about stress, parenting, and child health.

• I also investigate the intergenerational transmission of stress and what steps we can take to stop stress effects from crossing generations.