Dr. Laura M. Glynn

The California Governor’s Office of Planning and Research, in partnership with the Office of the CA Surgeon General, has announced four awardees for the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine request for proposals, Addressing Health Impacts of Adverse Childhood Experiences through a Collaborative Precision Medicine Approach. We are pleased to report that Chapman’s Dr. Laura Glynn, Professor of Psychology, Associate Dean of Research at Crean College, and Director of the Early Human & Lifespan Development Lab is a principal investigator on one of the four teams that was funded.

Precision medicine holds promise to more fully apply data to improve health and health care. Nine million dollars in state funds will support proof-of-principle demonstration projects for families and communities with Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) with an aim to improve access, care, and outcomes through collaboration between academic, community, nonprofit, and private partners. Each team was awarded $2-2.4 million over a three-year timeline, beginning May 2021.

Project Summary

The burden of ACEs is not equally distributed, with greater risk of exposure among low socioeconomic and racial/ethnic minority communities. This project seeks to answer two unmet needs: 1. identify the degree that ACEs influence children’s neurodevelopment and 2. discover for each child a marker that can predict their level of resilience, so that targeted interventions can be delivered to children who need them most. The team aims to screen 100,000 children across Orange County and apply interdisciplinary expertise in brain development, emotional health, health disparities, community engagement, epigenetics, big data, and data-base design and sharing.

Project Team

Lead Principal Investigator
  • Tallie Z. Baram, MD, PhD, Bren Distinguished Professor, Director of the Conte Center, University of California, Irvine (UCI)
Principal Investigators
  • Michael Weiss, DO, FAAP, Vice President of Population Health, Children’s Hospital Orange County (CHOC)
  • Dan Cooper, MD, Associate Vice Chancellor for Clinical and Translational Science, Professor of Pediatrics and Biomedical Engineering, Director of the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research, UCI
  • Laura Glynn, PhD, Professor of Psychology, Associate Dean for Research, Chapman University
  • Candice Taylor Lucas, MD, Associate Professor, Co-Director of LEAD-ABC, UCI/CHOC
Key Partners, Collaborators, and Supporters
  • University of California, Irvine
    • David Keator, PhD, Research Professor, Database Structure Expert and Computational Scientist
    • Ali Mortazavi, PhD, Professor, ENCODE Human Genome Project Leader
    • Hal Stern, PhD, Professor of Statistics, Information and Computer Sciences; Interim Provost
    • Leslie Thompson, PhD, Co-Director of Precision Health Through Artificial Intelligence
    • Pramod Khargonekar, Vice Chancellor for Research
  • Children’s Hospital Orange County
    • Louis Ehwerhemuepha, PhD, Senior Data Scientist
    • Mary L. Zupanc, MD, Co-Medical Director, Neuroscience Institute
  • Children’s Hospital Orange County Primary Care Network
    • Charles Golden, DO, FAAP, Executive Medical Director
  • Chapman University
    • Thomas Piechota, PhD, PE, Vice President for Research
    • Sabrina Liu, PhD, Postdoctoral Researcher
  • Syntropy Technologies, LLC
    • James Kugler, Director
  • Illumina, Inc.
    • Mark Van Oene, Sr. Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer
  • The Simms/Mann Family Foundation
    • Victoria Mann Simms, PhD, President