Nissa Towe-Goodman, PhD, is a Research Scientist at Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Towe-Goodman’s research is focused on the early environmental processes that contribute to children’s social and emotional development, and the implications this has for children’s adjustment and mental health. This work has focused on sources of stress or support in the early environment, methodological approaches to assess environmental processes, stress, and emotion regulation, and the developmental epidemiology of mental health risk. She has extensive experience with observational methods and collaborative, multidisciplinary research across large, multi-site, multi-method projects (i.e., NICHD Study of Early Childcare, Toxic Stress Children’s Consortium, Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO)).

Towe-Goodman is currently the PI of a NIMH grant examining the role of types of greenspaces and the development of anxiety, depression, and ADHD from early childhood into adolescence, drawing from the Family Life Project (FLP). The FLP is a developmental, epidemiological study of 1,292 families with children born in six, predominately low-income and rural counties in North Carolina and Pennsylvania; she has served as an investigator on this project since 2019. Her current research also draws from ECHO (supported by NIH), which brings together participants from approximately 72 study sites across the country to understand the effects of a broad range of early environmental influences on child health and development.