News

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has announced it will award Kenneth Dodge of Duke University a MERIT Award worth more than $8 million, to study how to prepare families and children for kindergarten readiness and well-being beginning at the stage of pregnancy of the child. Dodge is the William McDougall Distinguished Professor of Public Policy Studies, a leader in early childhood development and child/family policy.

After repeated pandemic-related delays, the NIA-supported Animal Models for the Social Dimensions of Health and Aging Research Network (R24 AG065172, under the direction of DUPRI’s Jenny Tung, Kathie Mullan Harris [UNC], and Alessandro Bartolomucci [University of Minnesota]) was pleased to host its first in-person full network meeting in Minneapolis on September 22-24th, 2022.

In a paper recently published in Nature Aging, Carol Brayne (University of Cambridge) and DUPRI's Terrie Moffitt discuss the potential limitations of large-scale volunteer databanks (LSVD) in tackling ongoing global health challenges and inequalities.

Two new papers, authored by teams headed by DUPRI's Jennifer Lansford and using data from the Parenting Across Cultures study, examine the effects of pre-pandemic predictors on individuals' compliance with COVID mitigation strategies and vaccine hesitancy and with their mental well-being and substance use. Both papers also explore how confidence in government handling of the pandemic influences these behaviors.

The National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect (NDACAN) was recently renewed as the one Administration for Children, Youth, and Families-funded repository for data on child abuse and neglect, as well as Child Protectives Services contact.

In a new paper published in Housing Policy Debate titled "Racial Disparities in COVID-19 Case Positivity and Social Context: The Role of Housing, Neighborhood, and Health Insurance," a group of researchers, including Anna Gassman-Pines, Elizabeth Gifford, and Marcos Rangel examine the housing, neighborhood, and health insurance explain disparities in case positivity between and within racial-ethnic groups in Durham County, North Carolina.

DUPRI's Chris Wildeman, along with collaborators Sarah Font (Pennsylvania State University), Yo Jackson (Pennsylvania State University), Lonnie Berger (University of Wisconsin), and Kristin Turney (University of California, Irvine), has been awarded an NIH grant to study "Implications of Parental Incarceration for Child Health and Wellbeing".

An interdisciplinary team of researchers, led by PI Charles Nunn and Co-PI James Moody, aims to understand what factors turn a local outbreak into a global pandemic by focusing on human connections at a local, regional and global scales.

Eighteen years after administering an intensive childhood intervention program called Fast Track, Duke researchers have found that the program not only reduced conduct problems and juvenile arrests in childhood — it also improved family outcomes when the original children grew up and became parents themselves.