Child Maltreatment Research, Policy, and Practice

Sonya Negriff, Ph.D., is an expert in the effects of child maltreatment on physical and mental health. Dr Negriff received her Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the University of Southern California (USC). She then completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Adolescent Medicine at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, after which she returned to USC as a Research Assistant Professor. In her research Dr. Negriff uses a biopsychosocial approach to understand the pathways from child maltreatment to mental health and risk behavior, including depression, trauma symptoms, substance use and sexual risk behaviors. The bulk of her research has focused on explicating biological (e.g., pubertal timing, epigenetics, neuroimaging) and social mechanisms (e.g., social support, social media use) that increase vulnerability to mental health problems for children and adolescents with trauma experiences. Dr. Negriff recently took a position as a Research Scientist in the Department ofResearch & Evaluation at Kaiser Permanente Southern California with the goal of translating her research to directly improve the mental and physical health of vulnerable youth.