The Department of Psychology welcomed Assistant Professor Emily Merz this semester as the newest cognitive neuroscience faculty member. Her research program focuses on the effects of socioeconomic status (SES) and stress physiology on children’s brain development, and she began her first semester at Colorado State University teaching the Adolescent Psychology course. Merz is a member of the Society for Research in Child Development, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the Society of Biological Psychiatry.

Merz received her Ph.D. in clinical and developmental psychology from the University of Pittsburgh in 2012, and completed a clinical psychology internship with a specialization in neuropsychology at the University of California, San Diego. Merz then conducted postdoctoral research at Columbia University, where she studied the effects of socioeconomic disadvantage on children’s brain structure, the factors mediating those associations, and how differences in brain structure might explain socioeconomic disparities in cognition and mental health. At CSU, Merz will expand upon this work with plans to conduct longitudinal studies using multi-modal neuroimaging techniques.