BJ Casey – NAS

Biosketch

BJ Casey, PhD is the Christina L. Williams Professor of Neuroscience at Barnard College – Columbia University and a member of The Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School. She was one of the first to use functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the developing human brain, particularly during adolescence, accelerating the emergence of the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience. Her scientific discoveries have been published in ~ 250 articles in top tier journals including Science, Nature Medicine, and Nature Neuroscience cited over 81,500 times and highlighted by NPR, PBS, NY Times and National Geographic. She has received lifetime achievement awards for her research and mentoring from the Society for Neuroscience, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, the Association for Psychological Science, and the American Psychological Association, and she is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Science and the National Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Casey has served on scientific advisory boards and panels including the National Institute Mental Health (NIMH) Board of Scientific Counselors, the NIMH Advisory Council, the National Research Council (NCR) Board of Children, Youth and Families, and NCR committees on Assessing Juvenile Justice Reform and The Science of Adolescent Risk Taking. Her work on the adolescent brain has been cited in amicus briefs submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court and presented to congressional staff on Capitol Hill, the U.S. Sentencing Commission, and federal judges.

Research Interests

My research focuses on the neural correlates of cognitive processes across different ages, species, and emotional and social contexts to ultimately inform legal, social and medical policies. The adolescent brain has received a lot of media coverage with advances in brain imaging techniques that provide a voyeuristic opportunity for us to look under the hood of the "behaving" adolescent brain. These methods together with sophisticated nonhuman animal studies are providing new insights as to why adolescents experience and respond to the world in unique ways. Rather than depicting the adolescent brain as defective, our research paints a picture of a brain that is sculpted by both biological and experiential factors to adapt to the unique social, physical, sexual and intellectual challenges of adolescence. Specifically we are interested in which situations lead to diminished cognitive control and which lead to adaptive behavior and how adaptation will vary by one’s environment (e.g., threatening or safe). Specific questions driving our science include: When does the capacity for self control mature? How do social and emotional contexts impact this capacity? How do changes in neural circuitry help to explain changes in cognitive abilities across development? Are these changes observed in other species and if so, how might they be evolutionarily adaptive and when do they become maladaptive?