Research Assistant Professor
Suzanne Perkins’s global health focus centers on understanding the cognitive outcomes of childhood maltreatment, including child abuse and neglect, and how these experiences shape life course functioning. Her work examines outcomes such as executive functioning, brain injury, disability, PTSD, educational attainment, and related dimensions of child and adolescent well-being. Her interests in global health equity align with the Center’s themes of strengthening systems for health and addressing social and environmental determinants of health. Perkins’s research draws on educational neuroscience methods—including fMRI and MRI, cognitive neuroscience, cognitive science, and developmental approaches—to examine poverty and language development, exposure to intimate partner violence and child adjustment, and violence exposure and school-related functioning. She also uses survey and neuropsychological methods and is beginning to apply AI approaches to study brain injury across datasets.
