People

Dr. Katie Insel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University. She is a faculty fellow in the Institute for Policy Research and a faculty affiliate in the Northwestern Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program, the Cognitive Science Program, and the Institute for Innovations in Developmental Science. She earned her PhD from Harvard University and completed postdoctoral training at Columbia University. 

Dr. Insel directs the Child and Adolescent Translational Science Lab, which examines how brain development shapes learning, decision-making, and goal-directed behavior. She studies how young people build cognitive skills to meet the challenges of daily life and investigates the relationship between brain development and wellbeing. A central focus of her work is understanding why adolescence, a period marked by substantial brain maturation, is also a period characterized by heightened risk for mental health disorders. 

Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute for Mental Health. She has received several honors, including the Association for Psychological Science Rising Star Award, the American Academy of Medical Sciences MOSAIC Scholarship, and the Pang Family Foundation Fellowship. Dr. Insel is committed to applying scientific discoveries to improve policy and practice. She works with policymakers, lawyers, educators, and clinicians to create evidence-based solutions that promote youth wellbeing.

Robin Nusslock is a Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University, where he also holds appointments in Psychiatry, Neurobiology, and Neurology. He is the Director of the Affective & Clinical Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern, as well as the Director of Clinical Psychology and Director of Clinical Training.  

Dr. Nusslock’s research examines brain systems involved in positive and negative emotion and how these systems contribute to mental and physical health problems across development. He is particularly focused on studying risk and resilience for mental health problems during adolescence, a period marked by accelerated brain development and heightened interpersonal stress. His recent work explores how early life adversity “gets under the skin” to affect brain–body signaling, especially between the brain and immune system, to influence long-term health and disease risk. He is committed to translating this research to inform the development of intervention and prevention programs to promote mental health and well-being across the lifespan. 

He has published over 130 peer-reviewed articles on the neuroscience of emotion, development, and health, with continuous NIH funding for more than a decade.  He has received the Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science and the Early Career Award from the International Society for Bipolar Disorders, and he is President-Elect of the Society for Research in Psychopathology. His work has been featured in both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Jennifer Tackett is a professor of psychology at Northwestern University. She is the editor-in-chief at Clinical Psychological Science, has served as an associate editor at eleven other academic journals, and is affiliated faculty at the Institute for Policy Research, the Northwestern student incubator The Garage, and the Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the McCormick School of Engineering. Prof. Tackett is principal investigator of the Personality Across Development lab at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on identifying and measuring early personality characteristics related to how youth learn to get along, get ahead, and keep it under control. She works from a broad perspective that identifies personality traits as potentially both adaptive and maladaptive, and is interested in harnessing early personality to facilitate leadership development in youth and early adulthood.