Candice Odgers

Candice Odgers
Citizenship	Canadian
Occupation	Professor
Awards	Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest Early Career Award (2015) Jacobs Foundation Advanced Research Fellowship (2016)
Academic background
Alma mater	Ph.D., University of Virginia 2005 M.A., Simon Fraser University 2001 A.B., Simon Fraser University 1999
Academic work
Institutions	Duke University, University of California Irvine

Candice L. Odgers (born 1976) is a developmental psychologist who studies adolescent and child development. Her research focuses on how early adversity and exposure to poverty and inequality shapes adolescent mental health and development. Her team team has developed new methodologies and approaches for studying health and development using mobile devices and online tools, with a focus on how digital tools and spaces can be improved to support children and adolescents. Odgers is currently a professor of Psychological Science at the University of California, Irvine and a Research Professor at Duke University. Odgers is also the Co-Director of Child Child and Brain Development Program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

Odgers has received multiple awards for her research including the 2016 Advanced Research Fellowship from Klaus J. Jacobs Foundation, 2015 Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest Early Career Award from the American Psychological Association, 2014 William T. Grant Scholar Award, 2012 Janet Taylor Spence Award from the Association for Psychological Science, and 2005 Alice Wilson Award from the Royal Society of Canada.

Biography

Odgers attended Athol Murray College of Notre Dame, an athletically themed boarding school, to play basketball, volleyball and run track. She then moved to a nearby city to complete her secondary education and was the first in her family to complete high school. Odgers then went on to play college basketball and attend Simon Fraser University, where she received her undergraduate degree in Criminology and Psychology.

In her second year of college, the Simon Fraser Women's Basketball team was involved in a serious accident while traveling a game in the United States. Odgers was injured in the accident and spent a number of years in recovery and rehabilitation. Following her recovery, she obtained a Honors and Masters level degree from Simon Frauser University in 2001 and was awarded with the Terry Fox Medal for overcoming adversity. Odgers was awarded a Commonweath Fellowship to continue her studies at Cambridge University, but was recruited instead by Professor Dick Reppucci to pursue a PhD in psychology at the University of Virginia, which she earned in 2005. Reppucci and Odgers began researching the importance of social settings in child development and conducted a large scale longitudinal study with adolescent females who were sentenced to custody in Virginia. With Marlene Moretti, Odgers also co-lead a multi site study across Canada and the United States focused on the mental health of adolescent girls in juvenile justice settings and mental health settings across the two countries.

Odgers completed her postdoctoral training between 2005–07 in England at the Social, Genetic, & Developmental Psychiatry Centre with Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi, during which time she helped to create a 'genes-to-geography' data archive for 2,232 children from the Environmental-Risk Longitudinal Twin Study.

In 2007, Odgers moved back to the United States and earned a faculty position at the University of California, Irvine and in 2008 she was awarded a William T. Grant Scholars Faculty Award to support her new program of research using mobile devices to capture the daily lives and health of adolescents (the miLife Study) and develop new tools for mapping children's neighborhoods using Google Street View to better understand how the neighborhoods that children grow up in impact health. Odgers began working at the University of California, Irvine in 2007 as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor from 2011–12. She then worked as Associate Director at the Center for Child and Family Policy of Duke University from 2012–2016. In 2012, Odgers took the position in the Sanford School of Public Policy and the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University. Odgers became a Fellow, for the Association for Psychological Science in 2013, and a Fellow at the Child Brain & Development Program Canadian Institute for Advanced Research in 2016. She is currently working as a psychology professor at the University of California-Irvine and Duke University.

Research

Odgers' research focuses on how children's early experiences and exposure to adversity influence their later mental and physical health. Her team has developed new methodologies and tools for studying adolescents' mental health in daily life and her most recent findings and research review have been cited widely, including in a feature story in the New York Times, to dispute claims that adolescents' use of digital technologies are responsible for increasing rates of mental health problems and disorders among adolescents.

Odgers fields of study developmental psychology, quantitative psychology, and public policy. Odgers' research contributions fall under two main categories.

First, Odgers has used mobile and other online tools to capture and understand adolescents'mental health and experiences in daily life. Her most recent study involved over 2100 young adolescents, sampled to be representative of children attending public schools in North Carolina, and for whom a representative subsample (n=400) were followed intensively via mobile devices and wearables. Using these data, she reported in the journal Nature evidence of a “new” digital divide which she argues threatens to amplify existing inequalities and is likely to pose specific challenges for adolescents already at-risk . Odgers and her team have integrated data, ranging from cellphones to census tract, to test for neighborhood-to-perceptual influences on adolescents’ mental health and, more generally, has leveraged intensively gathered assessments, within individuals, to identify daily triggers of mental health symptoms across early adolescence.

Second, in a related line of research, Odgers has collaborated with geneticists, psychiatrists, and statisticians on the Environmental Risk Longitudinal Twin Study (N=2232) to map the long-run influence of childhood adversity, neighborhood contexts, and poly-victimization on adolescent and adult outcomes, including: epigenetic marks, inflammation, economic and educational outcomes, loneliness, suicide risk, obesity, and psychosis.

Representative publications

• Nagin, D. S., & Odgers, C. L. (2010). Group-based trajectory modeling in clinical research. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 6, 109–138.
• Odgers, Candice L., Avshalom Caspi, Michael A. Russell, Robert J. Sampson, Louise Arseneault, and Terrie E. Moffitt. (2012). Supportive parenting mediates neighborhood socioeconomic disparities in children's antisocial behavior from ages 5 to 12. Development and Psychopathology, 24(3), 705–721.
• Odgers, C. L., Caspi, A., Broadbent, J. M., Dickson, N., Hancox, R. J., Harrington, H., ... & Moffitt, T. E. (2007). Prediction of differential adult health burden by conduct problem subtypes in males. Archives of General Psychiatry, 64(4), 476–484.
• Piquero, A. R., Fagan, J., Mulvey, E. P., Steinberg, L., & Odgers, C. (2005). Developmental trajectories of legal socialization among serious adolescent offenders. Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, 96(1), 267.

External links

• Faculty page
• Candice Odgers publications indexed by Google Scholar