Ed Tronick

Ed Tronick is a developmental and clinical psychologist. Dr. Tronick is Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, and director of the Child Development Unit. He is a past member of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and the Boston Process of Change Group, and a Founder and faculty member of the Touchpoints program. He created the Infant-Parent Mental Health Post Graduate Certificate Program at the Medical School. He developed the Newborn Behavioral Assessment Scale and the Touchpoints Project with T.B. Brazelton. With Barry Lester he developed the NICU Network Neurobehavioral Assessment Scale. He is currently working on developing norms for the neurobehavior of clinically health newborns and collaborating with Rosario Montirosso in Milan on a multi-NICU examination of developmental caretaking and its effects on preterm infants. Dr. Tronick developed the Still-Face Paradigm and recently the Caretaker Acute Stress Paradigm. He continues to do research on the effects of maternal depression, other affective disorders and drug exposure on infant and child social emotional development. Current research focuses on infant memory for stress and epigenetic processes affecting behavior. The research utilizes the still-face and other stress paradigms and multiple measures including ERP and EEG, salivary cortisol, and skin conductance as well as behavior. For the state’s initiative to screen women for post-partum depression he is working on epidemiologic data sets to understand the nature of the responses to questions related to depression and help seeking of women in different ethnic and racial groups. Relatedly studies are being carried out on the long term relation of stress hormones to SES, exposure to violence and other community factors, possible unique effects related to health disparities in ethnic and racial groups and brain development and parenting of micro-Lemurs. He is developing conceptual models based in dynamic systems theory for dyadic infant-mother (adult) interactions, including the Mutual Regulation Model and the Caretaker Buffer-Transducer Model. He has published more than 300 scientific articles and 7 books, several hundred photographs and has appeared on national radio and television programs. His research is funded by NICHD and NSF.