Alexandrea Craft, PhD
Biography
Alexandrea Craft recently completed her PhD in Clinical Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a clinical fellowship at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. To date, her research has focused on understanding how early adversity is experienced psychologically and physically by mothers and fathers during the prenatal period, and how adversity is transmitted to infants through parents’ behaviors and stress hormones during the perinatal period. Currently, she is a T32 postdoctoral fellow at the Albert School of Medicine at Brown University working with Dr. Barry Lester in the Brown Center for the Study of Children At Risk. As a postdoc, Dr. Craft has continued to study risk and resiliency factors with a focus on infant mental health and preterm infants’ neurodevelopmental outcomes. Additionally, she has expanded her knowledge of intervention science as part of an interdisciplinary team developing a NICU-based parenting intervention to support preterm infants’ regulatory skills; the goal is to develop an intervention that is both individualized and scalable to meet diverse families’ level of need in the NICU while supporting preterm infants' heightened risk for poor developmental outcomes. If mothers and caregivers can be better engaged in treatment early in the prenatal and postpartum period, interventions during a critical developmental period for children become possible. Outside of work, Dr. Craft enjoys baking, snowboarding, bike riding, and power lifting/strength training. She competes in strongman/strongwoman competitions.