I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My family resided in a large Italian community in the city, and throughout my childhood and teenage years, I had important friendships with culturally, ethnically, racially, and economically diverse individuals, including young children developing in harsh conditions. From a very early age, I began formulating an understanding of how poverty, hardship, and malevolent care can exert deleterious impacts on children and families. This established the foundation for my lifelong dedication to improving the well-being of those growing up in challenging circumstances.

During my undergraduate years at the University of Pittsburgh, I was strongly influenced by two psychology professors, Ping Serafica and Alex Siegel. With Serafica, I embarked on research on attachment and on the organization of behavioral systems in infants and children with Down syndrome. My work on Down syndrome helped to spark my interest in the mutual interplay between normal and atypical development.

Siegel was my mentor throughout my undergraduate career. Siegel was a very productive and respected developmental scientist. I learned invaluable research skills from him that prepared me well to succeed in graduate school. Moreover, Siegel conveyed unwavering support for me, and his belief in me played a pivotal role in my personal and professional growth.

Under Siegel’s guidance, I decided to pursue a PhD in psychology rather than going to medical school and becoming a psychiatrist. In making my decision to obtain a PhD in psychology I was torn between attending which of the two best graduate programs that accepted me: McGill and Minnesota. D. O. Hebb’s paper “What Psychology Is About (1974)” and Paul Meehl’s article (1972) “Second Order Relevance” both shaped my academic trajectory. In Hebb’s paper, he recalled a statement of one of his colleagues, to wit: anything not worth doing is not worth doing well. This statement had a profound effect on me. I transposed it to read: anything worth doing should be done well.

Siegel had received his PhD from Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development. He urged me to accept the Minnesota offer because he felt it was better suited to my long-term academic goals. After much thought, I decided to enter graduate school at the University of Minnesota in the fall of 1972, where I pursued a joint doctoral degree in developmental and clinical psychology in the Institute of Child Development (ICD) and the Department of Psychology. It was during my graduate career that I began to formulate my views on a developmental psychopathology perspective. I came to realize that the field needed to be interdisciplinary and to focus on the interplay between normality and psychopathology. Finally, influenced by Norm Garmezy, one of my professors in clinical psychology, I learned that it was equally important to examine the multilevel processes by which individuals who had experienced significant adversity developed in a resilient fashion.

In order to acquire the interdisciplinary depth and breadth I deemed necessary to attain my ultimate career goals, I also took courses in basic neuroscience, genetics, and psychophysiology. I worked closely with Paul Meehl, my mentor in clinical psychology, and with Alan Sroufe, my mentor in developmental psychology. I could not have been mentored by two better people than Meehl and Sroufe, and to this day I recognize my great debt to both of them. Temperamentally similar to Meehl, I profited greatly from our numerous discussions. Much of my research in graduate school investigated development in infants and children with Down syndrome in collaboration with Sroufe. This research was both multi-domain and longitudinal in nature. Sroufe ensured that I developed the competencies necessary to conduct this work. Both Meehl and Sroufe were extremely supportive, providing me not only a stimulating and exciting intellectual climate but also great emotional support.

Several other individuals at Minnesota were influential in my development. These include: Byron Egeland, with whom I first began my research and writing on child maltreatment; Bill Charlesworth, who taught me the importance of an evolutionary perspective; Gilbert Gottlieb, with whom I learned about the bidirectional relation between experience and neurobiology; Irv Gottesman, with whom I studied the contribution of genetics to understanding schizophrenia; and Michael Maratsos and Tom Trabasso, whose great faith in me enabled me to make the transition to my new academic home.

My work in graduate school culminated in the acceptance of an assistant professorship at Harvard. Not surprisingly, when I accepted the Harvard offer, my first job right out of graduate school, I experienced anxiety and self-doubt. I wondered whether I possessed enough talent to receive a position at Harvard, especially while still in my twenties. En route to Cambridge from Minneapolis, I stopped in Pittsburgh to see my maternal grandmother for a few days. I needed a pep talk because I was anxious about the impending move. My grandmother was born in Italy, and she only had a fourth-grade education. Nonetheless, she was one of the wisest people I ever knew. I have never forgotten her words to me as I was leaving her home in the fall of 1977, to wit: “No one is better than you.” I have always interpreted her words to mean that no one was better than me and that I was not better than others. And I have shared my grandmother’s words of wisdom with my students when they have insecurities or self-doubt.

In the fall of 1977, I began my assistant professor appointment at Harvard University, which was the perfect place for me in many ways. The fact that this was a time-limited, non-tenure-track position freed me to embark on projects that most assistant professors in search of job security would not have undertaken. During my second year there, my colleague and close friend, Ross Rizley, and I received a grant from the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect (NCCAN) to initiate longitudinal research on the etiology, intergenerational transmission, and developmental sequelae of child maltreatment. Aided by the bright, creative, and ever-energetic, Larry Aber, and by the wise advice and counsel of my career-long supporter, Ed Zigler (who I met as a graduate student at Minnesota), Rizley, Aber, Vicki Carlson, and I formed the Harvard Child Maltreatment Project.

In addition, I devoted my attention to several other projects. These included theoretical and empirical work on the relation between affect and cognition in typical and atypical development with Petra Hesse, theoretical writings on childhood depression with Karen Schneider-Rosen, and research on symbolic language and self-system development in children with Down syndrome in collaboration with Marjorie Beeghly.

I was promoted to associate professor in 1983, albeit without tenure as was the case at Harvard then. I also received an appointment as the Norman Tishman Associate Professor. I also focused on crystallizing my thoughts on developmental psychopathology during this time, influenced by the work of Tom Achenbach, Norm Garmezy, Michael Rutter, and Alan Sroufe.

In 1984 I edited a special issue of Child Development that was devoted to developmental psychopathology that, for many in the field, marks the modern-day emergence of the discipline. While at Harvard, Thursday evenings were a highlight and I looked forward to them with great anticipation. Nina Murray, a wonderful woman and the wife of the eminent personality psychologist, Henry Murray, organized a small weekly gathering of researchers and clinicians who were deeply involved in trauma and child maltreatment research and clinical work. Nina invited Bessel van der Kolk, a major figure in the field of trauma, Judy Herman, one of the leaders in the nation in treating trauma, and Eli and Carolyn Newberger, well-known experts in child maltreatment. I also was fortunate to be invited and these meetings were a great experience for me, both professionally and personally. Nina treated me very well and viewed me as a valuable member of our weekly group meetings.

Many individuals were influential in promoting my professional and personal growth during my eight years at Harvard (1977–1985). Jerry Kagan, Steve Kosslyn, Brendan Maher, and Shep White all were inspirational to me. My junior faculty colleagues, especially David Buss and James Stellar, also enhanced my perspective on broader aspects of the field. Finally, psychiatric colleagues Jules Bemporad, Joseph Lipinski, and Gerald Klerman provided encouragement and support to me and also recognized my potential as a psychopathologist well before my publications in that area had come to fruition. Furthermore, during times of adversity, I was extremely fortunate to experience the great care and understanding provided by Marjorie Beeghly, Jules Bemporad, Phil Holzman, Cal Izard, Michael Lamb, Duncan Luce, Alex Siegel, and Alan Sroufe.

In 1985, two years after being named the Norman Tishman Associate Professor of Psychology at Harvard, I assumed the position of director of Mt. Hope Family Center at the University of Rochester, where I was later appointed the Shirley Cox Kearns Professor of Psychology, Psychiatry, and Pediatrics. Although I had conducted research with high-risk children and families since my junior year at the University of Pittsburgh, I wanted to complete the goal I had as an undergraduate when I had envisioned developing an interdisciplinary center that integrated basic research, education, prevention and intervention studies, child advocacy, and social policy.

Whereas the 1984 special issue of Child Development is often viewed as critical to launching the field of developmental psychopathology, the emergence of the field was crystallized, in part, at Mt. Hope Family Center. In 1989, the Rochester Symposium on Developmental Psychopathology was initiated in collaboration with Sheree Toth, the Associate Director of Mt. Hope, and the inaugural issue of the journal, Development and Psychopathology, of which I was the founding editor, was published. Donald Cohen, the legendary director of the renowned Yale Child Study Center, and I co-edited the first edition of Developmental Psychopathology, one of the first compendiums of theory, methods, and multilevel research in the discipline.

After I arrived in Rochester, I was determined to expand Mt. Hope Family Center from a small preschool serving fifteen maltreated children into a nationally renowned research, education, and clinical facility. In 1987 I obtained funding from the Board of Trustees of the University of Rochester, federal and private agencies, and the community (through the Rochester Monroe County Department of Social Services and the United Way) to move the center to a much larger facility of 40,000 useable square feet, that was designed and formatted to be sensitive to children and families, as well as to diverse ethnicities, races, and cultures. Moreover, it housed numerous biological laboratories, including psychophysiology, neuropsychology, and phlebotomy labs. In addition, the facility contained many experimental rooms for psychological research and several labs for prevention and intervention research. We also increased the number of maltreated youngsters in our preschool program from fifteen to sixty by developing a relationship with the Department of Social Services in Rochester.

At the annual graduation ceremony for our preschoolers, a number of community members attended, as did many parents of the preschoolers. Many of these individuals came up to me at the conclusion of the event. They praised me for all of the great things happening at Mt. Hope. I thanked them for their kind words, but inwardly I knew that many of the children needed much more than a preschool program. Our special education teachers lobbied hard to find appropriate placements in Rochester schools to help the children and their families continue on an improved developmental trajectory. In addition, we developed an after-school program that operated three to four hours per day. Children were bussed to Mt. Hope from their school and to their homes at the conclusion of the daily program.

Furthermore, each summer we held a thirty-five-hour per week Summer Camp in which research was conducted about fifteen hours per week. Approximately 225 school-age children participated in each camp. These children came from disadvantaged low-SES backgrounds; half of them were maltreated and half were non-maltreated from a similar social class background. Camp participants came from diverse ethnicities and racial groups including Black, Latinx, and White children and were bussed to and from the camp.

In these summer research camps, we studied emotion regulation, attachment, self-development, peer relations, behavior problems, and school adaptation. Our biological assessments included neuroendocrine regulation, psychophysiological correlates of emotion recognition, emotion-potentiated startle, and hemispheric activation asymmetry.

The results of our research demonstrated unequivocally that child maltreatment exerts a deleterious effect on developmental processes. Furthermore, in collaboration with Sheree Toth, Jody Todd Manly, and Fred Rogosch, we implemented two large-scale longitudinal preventive interventions with maltreated infants. We chose to initiate our interventions during infancy because it is a period of formative and rapid physiological and brain development that makes infancy a particularly vulnerable and sensitive stage of life. Moreover, maltreatment in infancy may set the stage for a cascade of negative developmental processes. These preventive interventions revealed that Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP) was efficacious in promoting secure attachment in the maltreated children and aided maltreating parents to become more responsive, sensitive, and attuned to their child.

At Mt. Hope I also initiated research on biological pathways to resilient functioning in maltreated children. Not all maltreated and traumatized children fall prey to the negative sequelae that otherwise accompany child maltreatment and trauma. The same developmental cascades that can amplify maladaptive outcomes over time also can potentiate or increase positive outcomes when the child benefits from some combination of experiences and biological propensities that tip an initial balance towards adaptive outcomes. My collaborators on these research projects on resilience were John Curtis, Jungmeen Kim-Spoon, Michael Lynch, and Fred Rogosch. In 2000, Suniya Luthar and I provided a critique of the resilience construct that has been cited nearly 14,000 times. Suniya and I also discussed the implications of research on resilience for preventive interventions.

During the 1990s, as the field of developmental neuroscience was flourishing, I began to expand my research program to examine the impact that child maltreatment had on brain functioning. Additionally, as the human genome was genotyped in the early 2000’s, I developed a molecular genetics lab at Mt. Hope. We also began to conduct preventive interventions with mothers with major depressive disorder and their offspring in order to ascertain whether both behavior and physiology can be modified by psychological interventions. This work reflects my long-standing interest in neural and behavioral plasticity.

In early 2005, my twentieth year as the director of Mt. Hope, the Institute of Child Development (ICD) at the University of Minnesota offered me an endowed professorship. Although it was an extremely difficult decision to move from the center where I had devoted my professional, and much of my personal, life for twenty years, the opportunity to return to my alma mater was a significant draw. I had fond memories of my graduate school experience at Minnesota. And Ann Masten, my close friend since we were in graduate school, was the director of ICD during my recruitment negotiations. Ann is a brilliant scholar, the world’s leading theorist and thinker on resilience, and a leading figure in developmental psychopathology. Importantly, the University of Minnesota was invested in developing a center to serve the high-risk impoverished population of North Minneapolis. I was thus recruited to be the inaugural director of the center.

I decided to accept the ICD offer in March of 2005, planning to arrive in Minneapolis that fall. Naturally, I did not want to abandon my colleagues at Mt. Hope, and I also wanted to ensure that the children and families continued to receive the best treatment. When the extraordinarily talented Sheree Toth, who served as the associate director of Mt. Hope from 1986 until my departure in 2005, was willing to assume the director’s position when I decided to leave, I knew that Mt. Hope would have great leadership.

I drove from Rochester and arrived in Minneapolis in early October 2005, accompanied only by my seven cats (six in kennels and one, my super cat, Deja, on my lap). Within a week, I was in the community giving talks about the planned center. I also presented a major lecture to the entire University of Minnesota faculty, who were from a variety of substantive areas. Through addressing university faculty from multiple disciplines, I conveyed that one of my goals was for the center to be multidisciplinary in nature.

For five years, Robert Jones (Vice President of the University of Minnesota) and I worked together to procure the necessary funding to build the center. One of my most memorable experiences came when Robert and I flew to Kansas City in 2009 for a meeting with Stevie Wonder, who had longstanding ties to the Minneapolis community. Stevie was giving a concert at the Starlight Theater on the night of our arrival. Sadly, his close friend, Michael Jackson, had passed away the previous day, and Stevie was besieged by reporters, paparazzi, and music aficionados. Nonetheless, he took the time to meet with us. During our meeting, Stevie pledged support for the center that Robert Jones and I were envisioning. He was willing to pledge his net proceeds from four to five of his concerts to our effort. To this day, I think about that meeting with Stevie, an incredible human being who has great empathy and compassion for disenfranchised and marginalized children and families.

On April 15, 2010, nearly five years after Jones and I had embarked on constructing the center, and after the community had become very supportive of the venture, the university informed us that the necessary funding for the center that we planned to address racial inequities, child maltreatment, foster care, poverty, and mental health, could not be obtained due to the downturn in the economy. The dream was over. I was devastated.

Rather than beginning new research at ICD once the Minnesota center was no longer feasible, I reinvigorated my collaborations with Mt. Hope. Patrick Davies, Fred Rogosch, Sheree Toth, Jody Todd Manly, Liz Handley, and I submitted a number of federal grants that received funding, thereby enabling us to continue our work together.

Consistent with a developmental perspective, my research with Mt. Hope examined the interplay between normal and atypical development; included both biological and psychological measures when striving to document the efficacy of preventive interventions; investigated whether resilience could be conceptualized as experience-dependent neural and behavioral plasticity; conducted multiple levels of analysis longitudinal research; studied how the experience of child maltreatment affected brain development; and aimed to discover how epigenetic modifications could affect gene expression and intervention efficacy.

In the course of conducting such research, I have had fruitful and innovative collaborations with several ICD faculty: Megan Gunnar fostered my interest in neuroendocrine regulation and neuroscience and, together, we emphasized the importance of conducting multilevel (biological and psychological) preventive interventions; Ann Masten, with whom I collaborated writing papers on resilience, co-editing a volume of the Minnesota Symposium on Child Psychology, and co-editing multiple special issues of Development and Psychopathology; Nicki Crick, my dear close friend, and I collaborated on research on bullying, precursors to borderline personality in children, and relational aggression; Melissa Koenig and I received a major National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) grant addressing the development of selective trust in maltreated preschoolers; Glenn Roisman and I collaborated on a longitudinal study of attachment in maltreated adolescents and also organized a Festschrift volume for Alan Sroufe and Byron Egeland; and Kathleen Thomas and I collaborated on several neuroimaging studies in maltreated adolescents.

I also worked productively with several colleagues in clinical psychology: Bob Krueger and I published a large longitudinal study with David Vachon and Fred Rogosch on the development of psychopathology in maltreated children and adolescents; Colin DeYoung, Fred Rogosch, Rachel Grazioplene, and I conducted several gene-environment interaction studies on maltreatment and psychopathology.

I have always greatly valued the mentoring process. Both Paul Meehl and Ed Zigler told me that the most important part of their legacy was the accomplishments of their students. Zigler stressed the criticality of being “a mentor for life.” At Harvard, Rochester, and Minnesota, I have been blessed with having such high integrity and extremely talented graduate students, a number of whom have already attained very respected stature in the field. I advise students to always “Be who you are, believe in yourself, and follow your passions.” Such a combination of self-belief and passion will among other things, provide a firm foundation for working your way through any major professional challenges and disappointments.

I have been fortunate to receive several recognitions for my theoretical, empirical, and intervention work. These include: the American Psychological Association (APA) G. Stanley Hall Award for lifetime contributions to developmental psychology in 2005; the APA Mentorship Award (2008); and the D. O. Hebb Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the APA in 2019. In 2011 I was the recipient of the Lifetime Contributions to Child Development Award from the Society for Research in Child Development; and in 2012 I was chosen to receive the Klaus J. Jacobs Award by the Jury of the Jacobs Foundation. The Association for Psychological Science (APS) selected me to receive the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award (2014) and the William James Award (2021).

As I finish writing this retrospective chapter a few weeks away from my official retirement from the University of Minnesota (June 30, 2023), I look forward to having more freedom and flexibility for collaborative projects with Mt. Hope. In my forty-six years as a professor, I have never taken a sabbatical. I have been a director and a journal editor for many of these years, and also did not like to leave my students without my mentorship for six months to a year. Thus, the retirement will be very welcome.

Mt. Hope recently received a five-year renewal of our P50 Center Grant from NICHD to advance the field of child maltreatment. We have assembled a multidisciplinary team of investigators from the Universities of Rochester and Minnesota to create the Translation Research that Adapts New Science For Maltreatment (TRANSFORM) Center. Building on state-of-the art research methodologies and clinical practices, TRANSFORM leverages theoretically grounded research and evidence-based interventions to optimize outcomes for children, adolescents, and adults across the lifespan who have experienced, or may be at risk, for maltreatment. With the support of a community committed to establishing trauma-informed systems that align policies and service-delivery systems to improve the standard of care, conditions are ripe to engage in transformational research and social policy change that could have a lasting impact. It is imperative that multisystemic initiatives such as TRANSFORM inform the field of child maltreatment research while ensuring that the lessons learned are disseminated to society more broadly. TRANSFORM utilizes best practices for disseminating current research findings on child maltreatment into language and communication systems that facilitate the greatest uptake among professionals across broad audiences.

It has been one of my greatest honors to be the founding editor of the journal Development and Psychopathology. I began my editorship in 1988 and it will culminate at the end of 2024. As the editor of this flagship journal, I shepherded the field through to its ascendance as one of the leading developmental science periodicals. Young scholars, well-known scholars, and diverse scholars from a variety of disciplines have contributed to the journal over the years. This enabled Development and Psychopathology to achieve my fundamental goal of being multidisciplinary.

In this last semester before my retirement, I received a phone call from the chancellor at McGill University who informed me that I was selected to receive an honorary doctorate at their June 2023 Convocation. As McGill was one of my two top choices for a graduate career, ending with an honorary degree from McGill to hang next to my PhD from Minnesota makes me feel as if my forty-six-year career has come full circle.