College

Health and Human Sciences

Department

Human Development and Family Studies

Category

Children and Families

Areas of Expertise

Child welfare, Family interventions

Samantha Brown

Brown focuses on how adversity shapes the health and development of children and families experiencing psychosocial risk, and developing and testing family-oriented interventions.

Her work identifies barriers, promoters and pathways to target those risk factors. Her recent work has focused on key biological and behavioral correlates, such as stress physiology and sleep, that may be implicated in childhood maltreatment as well as the role of parent-child interactions in buffering children from the negative consequences of early adverse experiences.

Brown has translated this work into the development and testing of family-oriented interventions for child welfare-involved families, with a specific concentration on a mindfulness- and trauma-informed randomized controlled trial.

Brown received her B.A. in psychology and criminal justice from The College of Saint Rose in 2007. She then studied at the University of Denver, where she received her M.A. in forensic psychology in 2010 and her Ph.D. in social work in 2016.