Medicine Grand Rounds, Bharathi Zvara “Web-Based Tools to Address Complex Mental Health Problems”

Dr. Bharathi Zvara is an assistant professor in the Department of Maternal and Child Health at the Gillings School of Global Public Health.  Her research examines the enduring impact of early experiences on social and emotional development across the lifespan. Guided by family systems and developmental psychopathology frameworks, her work investigates the processes through which factors within the family system (e.g., mother-child relationships, childhood trauma, and maternal depression) influence the development of self-regulation, emotions, and behaviors in offspring. Her current applied research examines (1) how adversity broadly, and childhood trauma in particular, influences developmental pathways toward psychopathology and competence across multiple generations, (2) how the quality of interactions between parents and young children impacts risk for poor self-regulation and childhood obesity, particularly for children born preterm, and,  (3) how web-based programs may accelerate science to practice for adults with childhood trauma histories.