The Substance Use, Psychopathology, and Neurodevelopment (SPAN) Lab is based in the Department of Psychiatry at the Robert Larner, M.D. College of Medicine at the University of Vermont. We are a developmental clinical neuroscience laboratory studying how brain maturation, mental health, and substance use unfold together across adolescence and early adulthood.

Our Approach

• Clinical work grounds our science. Direct clinical experience keeps our constructs tethered to how these problems actually present.
• We map associations between brain maturation and developmental psychopathology. Using longitudinal MRI in large developmental cohorts, our work characterizes how trajectories of cortical, subcortical, and white matter development relate to aspects of mental health across adolescence and early adulthood.
• We examine substance use as both outcome and exposure. Our work separates neurodevelopmental and behavioral vulnerabilities that precede substance use initiation from effects of exposure on subsequent brain and mental health trajectories.
• We push observational data toward causal insight. We use methods like person-level fixed effects, family-level models, and propensity-weighted designs to move beyond conventional between-person comparisons, which are particularly prone to confounding.
• We treat measurement rigor as inseparable from the scientific question. Our work carefully attends to measurement reliability and the attenuation it introduces in analyses, as well as issues like image quality control. Brain-behavior effects are often small and fragile, and measurement decisions can alter not just their magnitude but, in some cases, their direction.
• We are ultimately motivated by clinical utility. Our work seeks to identify for whom, and during which developmental windows, cannabis and other exposures are most deleterious, in service of easing suffering among adolescents and young adults.
• We are actively building toward bidirectional translation. In growing collaboration with preclinical partners, we are developing human circuit-level findings into testable animal models, with the goal that each informs and constrains the other.

Data Resources

Our work draws primarily on three large-scale cohorts:

• ABCD Study — The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study is the largest long-term study of brain development in the United States, following over 10,000 children from ages 9–10 into early adulthood.
• IMAGEN — A European longitudinal neuroimaging and genetics study of adolescent mental health and substance use, spanning multiple sites across Europe.
• ENIGMA-Addiction — A global neuroimaging consortium focused on identifying robust brain signatures associated with substance use disorders.