Our Members

Adriene Beltz, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology. The goal of her research is to leverage network analysis techniques to uncover how the brain mediates sex hormone influences on gendered behavior across the lifespan.  Thus, there are quantitative and substantive components to the work being conducted in the Methods, Sex differences, and Development – M(SD) – lab that she directs. Quantitative work concerns creating and applying individualized models, such as temporal network maps, to time series data; these are intensive longitudinal data, including functional neuroimages, daily diaries, and observations. Substantive work concerns investigating the links between androgens (e.g., testosterone) and ovarian hormones at key developmental periods, such as puberty and the reproductive years, on behaviors that typically show gender differences, including aspects of cognition (e.g., mental rotations and verbal fluency) and psychopathology (e.g., substance use and depression). Most of her research comes from a person-specific perspective, owing to the heterogeneity that exists across people, gendered processes, and time.