The Change Makers

PennStater Magazine May/June 2021

In October 2020, as the leaves began to change colors, University Park was a shadow of its usual fall self. The campus was quiet and mostly empty; few were around to notice the families with young children entering Henderson Building and making their way to the softly lit suite that houses Penn State’s Child Maltreatment Solutions Network (CMSN).

The children are participants in the CMSN’s flagship Child Health Study, a large-scale research project launched in 2017 with a five-year, $7.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. The goal of the study is to understand how life experiences can affect children’s health and well-being in both the near and long term. The study is specifically concerned with how children who have experienced abuse are able to cope with trauma, including how the stress of this type of early adversity might manifest in biological changes tied to health and development outcomes. Until the COVID-19 pandemic hit, more than 400 children—many of whom had been involved with Pennsylvania’s child protective  services after experiencing some level of abuse or neglect—had already taken part in the study, which resumed in October after a seven-month pause. The children entering Henderson, with extensive COVID-19 protocols in place, would, like their pre-pandemic predecessors, spend an entire day in the CMSN suite while a team of trained research professionals conducted a broad array of psychological, physical, cognitive, neuroimaging, behavioral, emotional, and relational assessments. After participating in these assessments and completing science and art projects, the children would leave their handprint on one of the suite’s walls. They’d return home at the end of a long day with a Penn State T-shirt imprinted with a picture of their brain as it looked in their MRI, taken on a machine located in Chandlee Lab.

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