Suzanne Perkins has planned her career around the insight that educators can play a key role in recovery for children who have been maltreated.
An estimated 37 percent of children in the U.S. are referred for investigation of abuse or neglect in their lifetimes, often leading to well-documented cognitive and academic deficits that last until adulthood.
The Future of Learning
Perkins, Research Assistant Professor of the Research Center for Group Dynamics (RCGD) at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, has received a 5-year (K01) career award from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) to develop a theory of the brain mechanisms that underlie the impact of childhood maltreatment on cognitive functioning. She will test these ideas using fMRI brain scanning, and share insights that could craft the future of learning for children at risk.
The project will unfold in two phases– analysis of data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD), the largest long-term study of brain development in the U.S., and brain modeling on a small cohort of children known to have experienced maltreatment, to develop an understanding of how the brain responds to tasks distinctly for children who have been maltreated.
The findings could directly help kids who struggle in school because of deficits in executive functioning, like planning, memory, and focus.
This work exemplifies how Michigan’s Life-Changing Education initiative connects research and practice to improve lives.
“The promise of neuroscience is that you could target interventions that could really support what you feel is going wrong. If you know what the data shows is going wrong in the brain, you can start to improve that function and help them to thrive in school.”
A Research Career Reignited
Perkins has first-hand experience teaching children at risk in the classroom and in social service settings. She developed her own undergraduate major in sociology of education at Hampshire College, and after working in the field, returned to her native Ann Arbor to complete a doctorate in the University of Michigan’s Combined Program in Education and Psychology (CPEP).
Her 2007 dissertation work on cognition and disabilities used data she collected from 115 incarcerated youth, a cohort with heavy histories of abuse and neglect; some 40% of these children had reported severe sexual abuse, Perkins said.
Perkins developed new skills in translational neuroscience, examining cognitive processing in childhood post traumatic stress disorder, during a postdoc with the Michigan Institute for Clinical and Health Research (MICHR).
But Perkins’s burgeoning research career came to an eight-year halt following a breast cancer diagnosis in 2012.
A long research hiatus could easily end an academic career. But educators can play a key role in recovery.
In 2022, Perkins secured a rare reentry grant from NICHD– an opportunity to return to a research career that would have remained out of reach without acrobatic orchestration by RCGD Director Rich Gonzalez.
“It’s a tribute to Rich specifically, and ISR in general, that they helped me to come back from having been out of research altogether,” said Perkins. “They supported me to be able to return to a productive research career.”
Cognitive Insights
Since then, Perkins’s work has led to important insights on how poverty affects language functioning in adults; what existing data show about brain regions affected by childhood maltreatment, and means of identifying probable cases of maltreatment that can lie hidden in health histories within large-scale studies, such as ABCD.
Researchers often look at the psychological outcomes that result from child maltreatment; very few are looking at cognitive or educational outcomes, Perkins said, but their work will be important to educators in the field who work every day with kids who have experienced abuse and neglect.
Children are surprisingly resilient, she said; they can flourish in spite of horrific histories.
“It’s powerful to really help kids from an educational standpoint,” said Perkins. “Helping abused or neglected children to thrive in school is really part of the recovery.”
This post was written by Tevah Platt, communications manager for the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research.