Professor Barch’s research is focused on understanding the environmental, psychological, and neural mechanisms that contribute to risk for mental health challenges, with a focus across the lifespan that ranges from infancy to adulthood. This research includes examining the impacts of a range of early adversities, including low socioeconomic status, health disparities, environmental toxins, chronic stressors (including bias and discrimination), and lack of access to adequate resources both prenatally and postnatally. While race and ethnicity themselves have not been the direct focus of her work, the longstanding confounding of poverty, health disparities, and stress with race and ethnicity in too many parts of the world means that study of the ways in which early adversity shape brain and behavioral development is highly relevant to understanding mental and physical and health outcomes amongst individuals with minoritized racial or ethnic identities.