TEDS - Key Persons
I recently joined TEDS team as a postdoctoral research fellow after completing my PhD in psychology at Université Laval, Canada. I am interested in understanding why some children and adolescents consistently suffer from anxiety over the years. My research investigates how genetic and environmental factors may exacerbate anxiety over time. For instance, I am particularly interested in documenting whether the genetic factors that increase risk for anxiety also increase the likelihood of being victimized by peers, which in turn may exacerbate youths' anxiety over the years.
I joined the TEDS team as a postdoctoral researcher in January and will be using TEDS data to investigate the associations between mental and physical health and lifestyle behaviour; and the extents to which these associations are independent of correlated genetic and environmental influences. I trained as a psychiatrist in Nigeria and did an MSc (Genes, Environment and Development) and PhD (Behavioural Genetics) at the SGDP.
I am interested in how and why cognitive, emotional, and behavioural traits run in families. It has been shown that children resemble their parents not only physically but also in terms of their intelligence, their behaviour, and on many psychological traits. These parent-child associations may arise because parents have a direct impact on the way that their children develop. However, almost all traits are under some degree of genetic influence so these parent-child associations could also arise because children share 50% of their DNA. For example, intelligent parents may rear intelligent children because A) they adopt parenting practices that nurture the development of intelligence in their children, and/or B) intelligent children may inherit a genetic propensity towards intelligence from their intelligent parents. My research is aimed at disentangling the role of the rearing environment from that of genetic transmission, and one particularly powerful way to do this is through the study of twins who have children.
I am therefore very excited that over the next few years we will be setting up the Children of TEDS study (CoTEDS). In this new study we will track the development of the CoTEDS children just as the development of the TEDS twins has been tracked. This time however, there will be an added focus on the role of the parent in child development. This will be the first study of it's kind, where a sample of twins and their children have both been assessed and their development followed from an early age. This will provide us with a completely unique and powerful research resource. Using data from CoTEDS we will be able to address some age-old questions about the role of the parent in child development.
My research is focussed on understanding how common mental health problems run in families. I joined the TEDS team in 2015, as a Research Assistant working to set up the Children of TEDS (CoTEDS) project. I completed my PhD part-time alongside that role, supervised by Dr McAdams and Prof Eley. I am now a postdoctoral researcher in the group, where I continue to help run the CoTEDS project. Prior to working with TEDS I completed my BSc in Neuroscience from the University of Manchester.
Louise joined TEDS in August 1996 as a research support worker. She manages TEDS finances and many administrative aspects of the study including recruitment of staff, preparing grant applications and monitoring publications. Louise has extensive administrative, historical and procedural knowledge of the study.
For 50 years, I have studied genetic and environmental influences on psychological development. When I came to the UK from the US in 1994, I decided that what was needed was a large, systematic study of psychological development in twins beginning in infancy. With incredible co-operation from families of twins and continuous funding from the UK Medical Research for 25 years, TEDS has made some of the most important and surprising discoveries about the origins of individual differences in psychological development. TEDS has become even more valuable by integrating the classical twin design with the DNA revolution. These findings and their implications are described in overview in my book, Blueprint (Penguin, 2019) and in a 2020 interview with Sam Harris' Making Sense podcast.