Sara Waters

Dr. Sara F. Waters is a developmental scientist and assistant professor of Human Development at Washington State University. She received her B.A. in Psychology from UC Berkeley, her Ph.D. in Human Development from UC Davis, and postdoctoral training in Health Psychology at UC San Francisco. Her research investigates the development of emotion, stress, and coping in young children. She collects data via physiological and biological markers of stress, observations of behavior, self-report, and one-on-one interviews. She is particularly interested in how adverse early life experiences get “under the skin” to compromise long-term physical and mental health and what can be done about this. She is deeply committed to preventive interventions that engage the parent-child relationship as a protective factor against the negative consequences of stress and adversity. Her current projects involve understanding the mechanisms by which stress is transmitted from parent to child and how stress and adversity during pregnancy affect the prenatal environment and put offspring at risk for negative outcomes in infancy and childhood.