The BottenLab is affiliated with the Center for Children and Families and Department of Psychology at Florida International University. We study teen brains, hormones, and pollution exposures to advance teen mental health and advance knowledge of endocrine and environmental influencess on the brain.
Our goal is to better understand the role of pubertal neuroendocrine plasticity in adolescent brain and mental health, while training the next generation of researchers in rigorous, open science.
Pubertal neuroendocrine plasticity
Funded by an NIH BRAIN Initiative K99/R00, the first arm of this research aims to understand pubertal neuroendocrine plasticity by, first, identifying brain regions sensitive to hormone changes during puberty and, second, describing the stability of such sensitivity throughout adolescence.
In the not-too-distant future, this work will be accompanied by a dense, longitudinal pilot study intended to chart individual-level trajectories of pubertal neuroendocrine development.
Environmental pollution exposures
The second arm of this work has, so far, focused on individual differences in brain structure and fuction related to outdoor air pollution exposures during the transition to adolescence. Future research will incorporate other environmental exposures (e.g., water and indoor air pollution) with an emphasis on endocrine-disrupting chemicals.
How does pubertal neuroendocrine plasticity confer vulnerability/resilience to neurotoxic and behavioral effects of environmental exposure?
Future research will bring together these two arms of research to understand how the hormone changes during puberty that alter brain plasticity make teens more or less susceptible to environmental harms (i.e., to brain and mental health).