Project Summary/Abstract
Educational attainment is a health disparities issue. School dropout is one of the strongest predictors of health
disparities across the lifespan, and improving educational outcomes has the potential to save eight times more
lives than medical advances. Dropping out of school is the culmination of a longer process of school
disengagement that starts much earlier in development. Fortunately, school disengagement is a modifiable
health determinant. However, a clearer understanding of the complex interactions among multiple, upstream
risk factors for school disengagement is needed to guide the development and evaluation of school-based
programming aimed at reducing distal health disparities. Exclusionary disciplinary practices (EDPs) in schools,
such as detentions and suspensions, are consistently associated with school disengagement. They are also
disproportionately used against students of color, which may lead to perceived discrimination and further
school disengagement, underscoring the notion that EDPs can be a form of race-based trauma. Due to
structural and institutional inequities, minority youth are also at increased risk for experiencing childhood
adversity, and mounting evidence suggests that experiencing childhood adversity lowers tolerance to coping
with later stressors. Thus, experiencing an EDP may be particularly harmful among minority youth previously
exposed to childhood adversity. Neurobiological functioning associated with childhood adversity may partially
explain this process. Guided by theories of neurobiological and minority stress, the specific research aims of
the proposed project include: 1) Determining whether discrimination mediates the associations between EDPs
and school disengagement; 2) Examining whether childhood adversity moderates the associations between
EDPs, discrimination, and school disengagement; 3) Examining whether neurobiological factors associated
with childhood adversity moderate the associations between EDPs, discrimination, and school disengagement;
and 4) Exploring how COVID-19 and remote-learning environments influenced the associations between
EDPs, discrimination, and school disengagement. This K01 proposal will be achieved by leveraging data from
the ongoing Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, a ten-year longitudinal study examining
brain development and child health among 11,878 youth within the United States. To build upon my expertise
in developmental psychopathology, I require advanced training in (1) neurobiological sciences applied to
childhood adversity; (2) quantitative analyses related to longitudinal, finite mixture modeling; (3) school-based
determinants of health and their associations with minority health and health disparities; (4) addressing social
and structural inequities within clinical, research, and academic settings; and (5) achieving scientific
independence as a health-disparities researcher. This project complements my previous training as a clinical
psychologist and will enable me to pursue a future line of independent, health disparities research using a
neurobiological, trauma-informed, school-based framework.
