Rotary Lunch Speaker - Mandy Skoranski, Center for Translational Neuroscience, University of Oregon

Our lunch speaker will be Mandy Skoranski, PhD, Center for Translational Neuroscience, University of Oregon.



Mandy will be speaking on parental stress biology and mental health symptoms and the affect on young children.



Amanda (“Mandy”) Skoranski attained her master’s degree from Colorado State University in Marriage and Family Therapy in 2007, and her Ph.D. from Penn State University in Developmental Psychology in 2009. Her research focus is on the biobehavioral dynamics of parent-child interactions during early childhood, and how parental characteristics (such as mental health and stress physiology) impact such interactions and in turn children’s socioemotional development. She is interested in understanding both the physiological and behavioral aspects of mental health difficulties in parents of young children, and how symptoms may be transmitted from parent to child during their vulnerable stages of development.



She is also interested in utilizing dynamical systems modeling to analyze how parents’ physiological activation can regulate the physiological activation of the child (and vice versa) during face-to-face interaction, and whether this may be one way in which dysregulation (such as over-activation of stress systems) may be passed intergenerationally.



She is currently working with data from the Coaching Adaptive Parenting Strategies project (PI: Elizabeth Skowron, Ph.D.) at the University of Oregon to better understand parent-child physiological dynamics among families in which child maltreatment has occurred, and whether patterns may be reorganized in a positive way through engaging families in a course of Parent-Child Interaction Therapy.