Cathi Propper and Roger Mills-Koonce
Dr. Cathi Propper
Senior Scientist and Associate Director for Training and Research, FPG Child Development Institute
Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Email: propper@email.unc.edu
Dr. Propper’s research broadly focuses on the development child self-regulation as a function of co-actions across behavioral, physiological, genetic, and environmental processes over time. She is the Principal Investigator of multiple NIH-funded grants investigating interactions between parenting behaviors, infant physiological function, and other salient prenatal/postnatal experiences as predictors of infant sleep and subsequent social-emotional and cognitive development across the first year of life. In addition, her other NIH-funded projects aims to understand the way in which these processes unfold over early childhood and influence child behavior and learning in the preschool classroom. Cathi has also been an Investigator and Director of the Durham Child Health and Development Study for over 10 years. As the Associate Director for Training and Research at the FPG Child Development Institute, Dr. Propper is responsible for coordinating the Carolina Consortium on Human Development (CCHD) Proseminar Series and overseeing the CCHD training program.
Dr. Roger Mills-Koonce
Associate Professor, HDFS and ADSSE, School of Education
Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience
Director of CDS OBSERVES, FPG Child Development Institute
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Email: mills-koonce@email.unc.edu
Dr. Mills-Koonce’s research focuses on the development of parenting behaviors, parent-child relationships, and the implications of parenting experiences for children’s behavioral, emotional, and cognitive development. His research integrates family systems and biopsychosocial approaches to the study of family processes and child development, including analyses focused on genetics, the psychobiology of stress reactivity and social affiliation, embedded relationships within the family system, and sociocultural influences on beliefs, behaviors, and psychopathology. Currently, Dr. Mills-Koonce is particularly interested in two distinct domains of study. First, across multiple studies he examines the interplay of biological and family processes in the emergence of conduct problems and callous unemotional behaviors in early childhood. Second, as Principal Investigator of the New American Family Study, he is interested in the health and well-being of same-sex couples and the factors affecting the transition to parenthood for LGBT individuals and couples. Dr. Mills-Koonce is also the Director of CDS OBSERVES, a research unit supporting the use of observational methods for studying parent-child relationships, and in this role has overseen the assessment of parenting for numerous federally funded studies and intervention programs.