Medical Alumni Weekend: Behind the Research: How Duke is Advancing Maternal Mental Healthcare

Elisabeth Conradt, PhD: A clinical & developmental psychologist whose mission is to promote infant & early childhood mental health. Her scientific focus is to better understand the intergenerational transmission of risk for mental health problems. In her CAN lab they document how exposures the pregnant person had throughout their lifespan can impact the pregnancy, preterm birth risk, newborn neurodevelopment, and susceptibility for psychopathology. Emotion dysregulation is a transdiagnostic, early-emerging marker of risk for a wide range of psychiatric outcomes, including ADHD, mood, and bipolar disorder. They study how emotion dysregulation - a modifiable intervention target - emerges early in development to inform preventive intervention efforts that begin prenatally and in the first year of life. Pregnant people with emotion dysregulation are also susceptible to a wide range of health risk behaviors, including substance use. She also conducts research involving the understanding of how prenatal substance exposure, in combination with associated environmental exposures, affects neurodevelopment mental health outcomes in early childhood. Her research goal is leveraging this science to prevent intergenerational transmission of mental health problems. She has been continually funded by NIH since 2011 & awarded an F32 postdoctoral fellowship examining the biological embedding of early life stress in children with prenatal substance exposure at Brown Univ. Her work has been covered in media outlets and she hasreceived multiple national and international early career research awards. Dr. Marla F. Wald is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Duke University Medical School. She is an Adult, Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst, who specializes in Perinatal Psychiatry. She treats individuals before, during, and after pregnancy who also have psychiatric issues. She established the Duke Perinatal Psychiatry Clinic in 2014 which has now expanded to include several perinatal psychiatrists, a psychologist, a doula, a clinical coordinator, multidisciplinary trainees.