HIRING - CLINICAL ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, PSYCHOLOGY

The Department of Psychology at the University of Georgia invites applications for a full time, non‐tenure‐track Clinical Assistant Professor. The successful candidate will support the training mission of the department’s in-house Psychology Clinic (http://www.psychology.uga.edu/clinic)  by providing supervision to doctoral students in a variety of evidence‐based assessments and interventions for children, adolescents, and young adults. Skills in ps

Cultural Psychology Program in Cuba - May 11-22,2025

Cuba Cultural Psychology
The Cultural Psychology Program in Cuba offers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel to a country rarely visited by Americans. Only 90 miles from the southernmost point of the United States, the island nation was declared a socialist State in May of 1961 by Fidel Castro, who had come to power in 1959. Our program will explore aspects of the lives of present-day Cubans, 64 years after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution.
 

Ashley Sanders

Assistant Professor, Behavioral and Brain Sciences Program

Dr. Sanders is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Georgia. She is a developmental cognitive neuroscientist who received her PhD in Applied Biopsychology from the University of New Orleans in 2019. She then began her postdoctoral training at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis working on the Lifespan Human Connectome Project in Development (HCP-D). Shortly after, Dr. Sanders joined the NIMH-funded T32 Developmental Neuroscience & Child Psychopathology postdoctoral training program in the Department of Psychiatry at Washington University under the direction of Drs. Deanna Barch and Joan Luby. She joined UGA in Fall 2024. 

Dr. Sanders' research aim is to elucidate the neural mechanisms by which socioeconomic disadvantage impacts a child's biobehavioral trajectory and risk for psychiatric illness, with the ultimate goal of informing public health policies targeting childhood adversity. To this end, she utilizes a range of neuroimaging modalities (e.g., resting-state functional connectivity, diffusion tensor imaging) alongside inflammatory biomarkers (e.g., cytokines) to understand the role of a child's environment in their neurodevelopment. She also has a keen interest in brain regions that are implicated in stress and cognition but are otherwise unexplored in relation to social and environmental disadvantage (e.g., the cerebellum).

Education:

Postdoc, Washington University in St. Louis (2020-2024)

PhD, University of New Orleans (2014-2019)

Research Interests:

Socioeconomic inequity is among the most pervasive types of childhood stress and is associated with a broad range of psychiatric disorders (e.g., major depression, anxiety, conduct disorder) and subclinical anomalies (e.g., altered reward processing, emotion dysregulation, school problems). There is a growing body of literature suggesting that socioeconomic disadvantage during childhood impacts brain development at structural and functional levels. Despite these challenges, disadvantaged children often develop adaptive skills and abilities to cope with their harsh environments. Adaptations to such settings may impact how the child processes information about their environment. However, the mechanisms through which childhood disadvantage affects neurodevelopment are not well understood. Dr. Sanders' program of research incorporates neuroimaging and immune metrics to investigate how disadvantage-related neuroinflammation impacts a child's developmental trajectory.  

Selected Publications:

Sanders, A.F.P., B., Seider, N. A., Triplett, R. L., Lean, R. E., Neil, J. J., Miller, J.P., Tillman, R., Smyser, T.A., Barch, D.M, Luby, J.L, Chen, E., Miller, G. E. (2024). Prenatal exposure to maternal disadvantage-related inflammatory biomarkers: associations with neonatal white matter microstructure. Translational Psychiatry, 14(1), 72.

Sanders, A.F.P., Harms, M.P., Kandala, S., Marek, S., Somerville, L.H., Bookheimer, S.Y., Dapretto, M., Thomas, K.M., Van Essen, D.C., Yacoub, E., & Barch, D.M. (2023). Age-related differences in resting-state functional connectivity from childhood to adolescence. Cerebral Cortex, 33(11), 6928-6942.

Sanders, A.F.P., Baum, G.L., Harms, M.P., Kandala, S., Bookheimer, S.Y., Dapretto, M., Somerville, L.H., Thomas, K.M., Van Essen, D.C., Yacoub, E., & Barch, D.M. (2022). Developmental trajectories of cortical thickness by functional brain network: The roles of pubertal timing and socioeconomic status. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 57, 101145.

Subscribe to

Support us

We appreciate your financial support. Your gift is important to us and helps support critical opportunities for students and faculty alike, including lectures, travel support, and any number of educational events that augment the classroom experience. Click here to learn more about giving.

Every dollar given has a direct impact upon our students and faculty.