Kathleen Thomas

Kathleen Thomas is a William Harris Professor and Director of the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Her research integrates developmental cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychopathology, and adolescent psychology, focusing on how socioemotional contexts shape cognitive learning and executive function in early adolescence. Her recent work examines the impacts of early deprivation on neural and behavioral measures of executive function, the heritability of rapid electrophysiological connectome dynamics, and age-related differences in resting-state functional connectivity from childhood to adolescence. She also investigates how friends modulate social evaluative stress and psychophysiological engagement during learning.