E. Jane Costello

Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University

Jane Costello was educated at Oxford University (MA) and the London School of Economics and Political Science (Ph.D.). She did a postdoc in psychiatric epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh. Currently she is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke, where she directs the Center for Developmental Epidemiology. Her program of empirical and theoretical work is designed to integrate developmental science and epidemiology, with the goal of improving the understanding, treatment, and prevention of psychiatric disorders in childhood and adolescence. In her work as an epidemiologist, Jane uses data sets available through the Center for Developmental Epidemiology to develop a model of child psychopathology that will help us to integrate findings about the causes of mental illness (“etiologic epidemiology”) with a better understanding of risk factors and the options for prevention (“public health epidemiology”). She is currently directing the seventeenth annual wave of data collection for the Great Smoky Mountains Study, a longitudinal study of the development of psychiatric and substance abuse disorders and access to mental health care, in a representative sample of 1400 children and adolescents living in the southeastern United States.