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.

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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.

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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.”

 

Read the complete article at Michigan Future of Learning