Elizabeth Jane Costello, Ph.D.
Distinguished Investigator

Dr. E. Jane Costello received her undergraduate training was at Oxford University and completed her Ph.D. at the London School of Economics, with post-doctoral training in psychiatric epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Costello is currently Professor of Medical Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University. At Duke, she helps to run the Center for Developmental Epidemiology, which brings together researchers from different disciplines in order to advance our understanding of the origins, course, and prevention of mental illness across the life course. In Dr. Costello’s work as an epidemiologist, she uses longitudinal data 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"). An important aim for Dr. Costello is to use findings from this work as the basis for developing a set of propositions about how public health can use a primary care/primary prevention model to improve the emotional and behavioral development of children.

Dr. Costello is also currently directing the fifteenth 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. Using information on perinatal, pubertal, and adult development that has been collected in the course of the study, the goal is to understand the role of developmental stages and timing in risk for psychiatric disorders, in particular adolescent depression.

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