Emma Jane Rose is the director of the Research on Adversity and Risk (ROAR) Lab in the Child Study Center at Penn State. Her primary research focus is on using a translational neuroscience approach to delineate changes in brain structure and function associated with suboptimal developmental trajectories and leveraging that knowledge to help prevent high-risk outcomes for children, families, and their communities. Key projects to which she has contributed include a longitudinal investigation of the neurodevelopmental correlates of substance use and abuse in adolescence, and a range of studies looking at the chronic and acute pharmacological effects of abused substances on the neural underpinnings of reward processing, among others.

Emma received her Ph.D. in psychiatry from the University of Edinburgh. This was followed by fellowship positions in Baltimore, MD and Dublin, Ireland, where she considered motivational deficits in substance abuse and used an imaging genetics approach to understand intermediate phenotypes for psychiatric conditions. She has authored/co-authored 36 peer-reviewed journal articles and 2 book chapters and has been an ad hoc peer reviewer for more than 20 journals including JAMA Psychiatry, Biological Psychiatry, and Neuropsychopharmacology, to name a few. Her research has been featured on the BBC and National Geographic.