# Mechanisms underlying resilience to neighborhood disadvantage

> **NIH NIH UH3** · MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY · 2020 · $717,436

## Abstract

Decades of research have confirmed the damaging effects of neighborhood disadvantage on
physical, socioeconomic, and mental health outcomes. Even so, many children growing up in
disadvantaged neighborhood contexts demonstrate adaptive competence. How do children achieve
these resilient outcomes in the face of such adversity? Extant studies indicate that familial- and
community-level factors protect these children from the many stressors found in disadvantaged
neighborhoods. Very little work, however, has considered the neurobehavioral pathways through
which these protective processes confer resilience. The proposed UG3/UH3 will do just this,
identifying neural markers of resilience and illuminating the multilevel epigenetic, environmental, and
genetic processes through which protective factors promote these neuro-resilient pathways. We
propose to re-assess a sample of 500 adolescent twin pairs (at age 11-16 years; previously assessed
between ages 6 and 10) residing in modestly-to-severely disadvantaged neighborhoods. We will
employ cutting-edge neuroimaging methodologies (i.e., joint models that bridge task and resting fMRI,
DTI, and sMRI) to identify the synergistic neural networks that are associated with resilience
(operationalized here as adaptive competence and the absence of psychopathology), while also
capitalizing on the longitudinal and genetically-informed nature of our unique `at-risk' twin sample to
illuminate the etiologic processes underlying neural markers of resilience. We specifically postulate
that, by protecting youth from the stressors presents in disadvantage contexts, positive parents and
communities enable children to develop the normative neural architecture that undergirds subsequent
adaptive outcomes, even in the face of adversity. Our genetically-informed developmental
neuroscience approach will thus provide an unprecedented opportunity to illuminate the multilevel
biobehavioral pathways leading to resilience, and in this way, fundamentally advance our
understanding of adaptation in the face of chronic adversity.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10000210
- **Project number:** 5UH3MH114249-04
- **Recipient organization:** MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** S. Alexandra Burt
- **Activity code:** UH3 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $717,436
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2017-09-01 → 2022-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10000210

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10000210, Mechanisms underlying resilience to neighborhood disadvantage (5UH3MH114249-04). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10000210. Licensed CC0.

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