BJ Casey explained

BJ Casey
Occupation:Professor of Psychology
Workplaces:Barnard College of Columbia University
Alma Mater:Appalachian State University
University of South Carolina
Awards:
  • 2017 Social & Affective Neuroscience Society Distinguished Scholar Award
  • 2019 Flux: The Society for Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Huttenlocher Award
  • 2021 Association for Psychological Science Lifetime Achievement Mentor Award
  • 2022 American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award
  • 2023 Mika Salpeter Lifetime Achievement Award, Society for Neuroscience

Betty Jo "BJ" Casey[1] is an American cognitive neuroscientist and expert on adolescent brain development and self control.[2] She is the Christina L. Williams Professor of Neuroscience at Barnard College of Columbia University where she directs the Fundamentals of the Adolescent Brain (FAB) Lab[3] and is an Affiliated Professor of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School, Yale University.

Casey has served on several national and international advisory boards and has won numerous honors and awards for her scientific discoveries that have been featured in several media outlets such as National Geographic,[4] Time,[5] and NPR.[6] [7] [8]

Biography

Casey was born in Kinston, North Carolina and grew up on a small family farm. She was the first in her family to obtain an advanced degree, earning her bachelor's and master's degrees in psychology from Appalachian State University and her doctorate in experimental psychology and behavioral neuroscience from the University of South Carolina. During her postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institute of Mental Health, Casey learned about functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which offered a glimpse into the functioning human brain non-invasively.[9] She was among the first scientists to use fMRI in children,[10] [11] laying the groundwork for a new field of study: developmental cognitive neuroscience.[12]

Following her postdoc, she was an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and a Visiting Research Collaborator at Princeton University.[13] She was then recruited by Michael Posner[14] to direct the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology. During this time, she held the position of associate professor and professor of psychology in Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medicine[15] and Visiting Researcher at Rockefeller University. Casey also served as the Director of the Neuroscience Graduate Program at Weill Cornell for five years. In 2016, Casey moved to Yale University as a professor in the Department of Psychology, an affiliate professor of Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program of Yale School of Medicine and affiliate professor of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School. Casey returned to New York in 2022 as the Christina L. Williams Professor of Neuroscience at Barnard College of Columbia University where she currently directs the Fundamentals of the Adolescent Brain (FAB) lab.[16]

Casey has served on several national advisory boards, including the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Board of Scientific Counselors and NIMH Council, the Scientific Advisory Board for the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia & Depression (NARSAD), Advisory Board for the Human Connectome Project - Life Span Study, the National Research Council Board on Children, Youth and Families, and National Research Council and Institute of Medicine committees of the National Academies on the Science of Adolescent Risk Taking, Assessing Juvenile Justice Reform, and Sports Related Concussions in Youth.[17]

Research

Casey is one of the most cited scientists in developmental neuroscience,[18] with over 235 publications and over 70,000 citations.[19]

Over the course of her career, her work has spanned a range of topics across human development from visual attention in infants, to adolescent development, and the subsequent transition into early adulthood.[20] In addition to using fMRI to examine typical and atypical brain and behavioral development, Casey has studied both humans and genetically altered mice in her research.[21] Her work has demonstrated similar patterns of behavior and brain activity during adolescence across species.[22] Casey proposed a prominent model of adolescent neurobiology known as the imbalance model,[23] a foundational theory for many developmental neuroscience studies in humans and in animals.[24] [25] This model posits that dynamic changes in brain structure and function during adolescence lead to transient imbalances in how brain areas communicate that impact emotion reactivity and regulation during adolescence, relative to earlier and later developmental stages.[26] In collaboration with the late Walter Mischel, Casey studied the original participants of Mischel's famous 1972 Stanford Bing Nursery School "Marshmallow Experiment" 40 years later. The study's findings suggested that individual differences in self-control seen in early childhood may be predictive of motivational processes and cognitive control in adulthood.[27]

During Casey's 15-year tenure as the director of the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology, she cultivated the institute's world-renowned reputation,[28] bringing in numerous training and center grants from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, the John Merck Fund, the Dana Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. Among these are two approximately $10 million grants from the National Institutes of Health.[29] From 2008 to 2013, one of these awards funded the Center for Brain, Gene, and Behavioral (CBGB) Research Across Development, which aimed to examine how brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) influenced learning and responses to stress across development.[30] In 2015, the National Institutes of Health funded the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study®, the largest long-term study of child and adolescent health and brain development in the United States.[31] Casey was awarded a grant of over $20 million as Principal Investigator of the ABCD Study Yale University site.[32] [33]

Mentoring and training

Casey directed the John Merck Fund Summer Institute on the Biology of Developmental Disabilities from 2001 to 2010 and then the Mortimer D. Sackler, M.D. Summer Institute on Translational Developmental Neuroscience from 2012 to 2016, both specialized training courses in developmental science for graduate students, postdocs, and early career faculty.[34]

Casey has formally mentored over 30 pre and post doctoral trainees. Her trainees include Adriana Galván, Catherine Hartley, Leah Somerville, and Nim Tottenham. She has received lifetime achievement awards for her scientific discoveries and mentoring, especially of women in science from the Association of Psychological Science in 2021 and from the Society of Neuroscience in 2023.[35] [36]

Public engagement

Casey is a member of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience[37] and has been called upon as an expert in adolescent brain development in both the scientific and legal arenas.[38] Her research was included in amicus briefs presented to the U.S. Supreme Court to argue against the death penalty in juveniles (Roper v. Simmons, 2005) and mandatory life without parole (Graham v. Florida, 2010; Miller v. Alabama, 2012).[39]

Awards and honors

Selected publications

External links

Notes and References

  1. News: Cohen. Joyce. 2009-02-27. A Wish List Fulfilled for an Apartment Hunter. en-US. The New York Times. 2021-06-12. 0362-4331.
  2. Web site: Research Highlights Strengths Of Adolescent Brain. 2021-06-12. NPR.org. en.
  3. Web site: FABLAB Barnard College. 2024-06-06.
  4. Web site: 2011-10-01. Teenage Brains. https://web.archive.org/web/20190510040603/https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2011/10/beautiful-brains/. dead. May 10, 2019. 2020-08-05. Magazine. en.
  5. Why Teenage Brains Are So Hard to Understand. 2020-08-05. Time.
  6. Web site: Understanding The Mysterious Teenage Brain. 2020-08-05. NPR.org. en.
  7. Web site: The Teen Brain: Half Baked or Well Done?. 2020-08-07. Support our science. en.
  8. Web site: Letters: Science And Religion, And The Teenage Brain. 2021-06-12. NPR.org. en.
  9. Web site: lukascorey. 2019-10-28. BJ Casey — Biography. 2020-08-05. ProfTalk. en.
  10. Casey . B.J. . Cohen . Jonathan D. . Jezzard . Peter . Turner . Robert . Noll . Douglas C. . Trainor . Rolf J. . Giedd . Jay . Kaysen . Debra . Hertz-Pannier . Lucy . Rapoport . Judith L. . Activation of Prefrontal Cortex in Children during a Nonspatial Working Memory Task with Functional MRI . NeuroImage . September 1995 . 2 . 3 . 221–229 . 10.1006/nimg.1995.1029 . 9343606 . 7257192 .
  11. Casey . B.J. . Davidson . Matthew . Rosen . Bruce . Functional magnetic resonance imaging: basic principles of and application to developmental science . Developmental Science . August 2002 . 5 . 3 . 301–309 . 10.1111/1467-7687.00370 .
  12. Munakata . Yuko . Casey . B.J. . Diamond . Adele . Developmental cognitive neuroscience: progress and potential . Trends in Cognitive Sciences . March 2004 . 8 . 3 . 122–128 . 10.1016/j.tics.2004.01.005 . 15301752 . 10.1.1.511.7524 . 2628973 .
  13. Web site: Casey CV 2020.
  14. Web site: Autobiographical Chapters. 2020-08-05. www.sfn.org. en.
  15. Web site: Casey, BJ. 2020-08-05. vivo.med.cornell.edu.
  16. Web site: NSB Department. 2023-11-25.
  17. Web site: 2017-03-31. BJ Casey, Ph.D.. 2020-08-05. Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. en.
  18. Web site: Profiles. 2020-08-05. scholar.google.com.
  19. Web site: BJ Casey, Ph.D. - Google Scholar. 2020-08-05. scholar.google.com.
  20. Drew. Amy. 2019-04-30. Deficit or Development?. APS Observer. en-US. 32. 5.
  21. Soliman . F. . Glatt . C. E. . Bath . K. G. . Levita . L. . Jones . R. M. . Pattwell . S. S. . Jing . D. . Tottenham . N. . Amso . D. . Somerville . L. H. . Voss . H. U. . Glover . G. . Ballon . D. J. . Liston . C. . Teslovich . T. . Van Kempen . T. . Lee . F. S. . Casey . B. J. . A Genetic Variant BDNF Polymorphism Alters Extinction Learning in Both Mouse and Human . Science . 12 February 2010 . 327 . 5967 . 863–866 . 10.1126/science.1181886 . 20075215 . 2829261 . 2010Sci...327..863S .
  22. Pattwell . Siobhan S. . Duhoux . Stéphanie . Hartley . Catherine A. . Johnson . David C. . Jing . Deqiang . Elliott . Mark D. . Ruberry . Erika J. . Powers . Alisa . Mehta . Natasha . Yang . Rui R. . Soliman . Fatima . Glatt . Charles E. . Casey . B. J. . Ninan . Ipe . Lee . Francis S. . Altered fear learning across development in both mouse and human . Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . 2 October 2012 . 109 . 40 . 16318–16323 . 10.1073/pnas.1206834109 . 22988092 . 3479553 . 2012PNAS..10916318P . free .
  23. Casey . B.J. . Getz . Sarah . Galvan . Adriana . The adolescent brain . Developmental Review . March 2008 . 28 . 1 . 62–77 . 10.1016/j.dr.2007.08.003 . 18688292 . 2500212 .
  24. Casey . B.J. . Jones . Rebecca M. . Levita . Liat . Libby . Victoria . Pattwell . Siobhan S. . Ruberry . Erika J. . Soliman . Fatima . Somerville . Leah H. . The storm and stress of adolescence: Insights from human imaging and mouse genetics . Developmental Psychobiology . 2010 . 52 . 3 . 225–35 . 10.1002/dev.20447 . 20222060 . 2850961 .
  25. Web site: The Teen Brain in a Grown-up World. 2020-08-07. www.brainfacts.org. en.
  26. Casey . B. J. . Beyond Simple Models of Self-Control to Circuit-Based Accounts of Adolescent Behavior . Annual Review of Psychology . 3 January 2015 . 66 . 1 . 295–319 . 10.1146/annurev-psych-010814-015156 . 25089362 .
  27. Casey . B. J. . Somerville . L. H. . Gotlib . I. H. . Ayduk . O. . Franklin . N. T. . Askren . M. K. . Jonides . J. . Berman . M. G. . Wilson . N. L. . Teslovich . T. . Glover . G. . Zayas . V. . Mischel . W. . Shoda . Y. . Behavioral and neural correlates of delay of gratification 40 years later . Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . 29 August 2011 . 108 . 36 . 14998–15003 . 10.1073/pnas.1108561108 . 21876169 . 3169162 . free .
  28. Web site: Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology Weill Cornell Medicine. 2020-08-05. weill.cornell.edu.
  29. Web site: Landmark Study Investigates Substance Use and Adolescent Brain Development. 2020-08-05. WCM Newsroom. en.
  30. Web site: CBGB. live. https://web.archive.org/web/20080526085255/http://sacklerinstitute.org:80/cornell/CBGB/ . 2008-05-26 .
  31. Web site: ABCD Study. 2020-08-05. ABCD Study. en-US.
  32. Web site: Yale University. 2020-08-05. ABCD Study. en-US.
  33. 2015-10-30. Massive NIH Effort to Understand Substance Use in Adolescents. APS Observer. en-US. 28. 9.
  34. Web site: New Sackler Foundation Gift Enhances Brain Research at Weill Cornell Medical College. 2020-08-05. WCM Newsroom. en.
  35. Web site: Eleven Psychological Scientists Receive APS's 2021 Lifetime Achievement Awards: Association's Highest Honors Recognize Outstanding Contributions to Science.
  36. Web site: Society for Neuroscience 2023 Promotion of Women in Neuroscience Awards.
  37. Web site: Research Network on Law and Neuroscience - MacArthur Foundation. 2020-08-05. www.macfound.org.
  38. Web site: Healthy brain development is a human right, argues Yale researcher. 2020-08-05. EurekAlert!. en.
  39. Web site: Journal. A. B. A.. Millions have been invested in the emerging field of neurolaw. Where is it leading?. 2020-08-05. ABA Journal. en.
  40. Web site: Honorary Doctorates - Organisation - Universiteit Utrecht. 2020-08-05. www.uu.nl. en.
  41. Web site: 2017-04-11. Past Outstanding Achievement Prizewinners. 2020-08-05. Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. en.
  42. Web site: 2016-08-09. BJ Casey. 2020-08-05. Irish America. en-US.
  43. Web site: BJ Casey receives the Social Affective Neuroscience Society Distinguished Scholar Award Department of Psychology. 2020-08-05. psychology.yale.edu.
  44. Web site: B.J. Casey receives the 2019 the Flux Huttenlocher Award Department of Psychology. 2020-08-05. psychology.yale.edu.
  45. Web site: Eleven Psychological Scientists Receive APS’s 2021 Lifetime Achievement Awards: Association’s Highest Honors Recognize Outstanding Contributions to Science. 2024-06-06. Association for Psychological Science.
  46. Web site: Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions: BJ Casey.. 2024-06-06. APA PsychNet.
  47. News: BJ Casey to receive the George A. Miller Prize in Cognitive Neuroscience Department of Psychology . 1 May 2023 . Yale . November 3, 2021.
  48. Web site: George A. Miller Award . Cognitive Neuroscience Society . 1 May 2023.
  49. Web site: The Society for Neuroscience Recognizes the Career Achievements of BJ Casey. 2024-06-06. WIA Report.