The STREET Lab (launching January 2027) investigates how stress and everyday environments shape the emergence of mental health difficulties from adolescence and young adulthood. We focus on the multiple contexts in which youth grow up—families, schools, neighborhoods, and broader social environments—and how these contexts inform risk, resilience, and developmental pathways to mental illness.

Millions of children in the United States and around the world live in communities where they do not feel safe. Many families struggle to meet basic needs, and numerous neighborhoods lack the resources that promote healthy development. Other environments foster chronic exclusion, marginalization, or a lack of belonging, contributing to rising rates of loneliness and mental health concerns. Our work aims to understand how these forms of stress and context could inform our understanding of mental health across development, with the long-term goal of informing targets for prevention and intervention efforts that are grounded in young people’s real-world experiences.

METHODS AND APPROACH 

The STREET Lab uses a multi-method, ecologically grounded approach. Our studies integrate:

• Ambulatory and real-time methods (e.g., ecological momentary assessment) to capture stress, emotions, and social experiences as they unfold in everyday life

• Population and intensive longitudinal datasets to examine population-level patterns, moderators of risk, and modifiable prevention and intervention targets, including cardiovascular risk markers and neuroimaging data

• Improved measurement of context (e.g., neighborhood characteristics, objective and perceived safety, social connectedness, resource access) to better reflect the environments youth actually inhabit​

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Across projects, we aim to center the lived experiences of young people and to generate knowledge that can meaningfully inform youth development and mental health. See below for further information on the lab research focus.