Margaret Sheridan, Ph.D., received her degree in Clinical Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007. After completing her clinical internship at NYU Child Study Center/Bellevue Hospital, she spent three years as a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at Harvard School of Public Health and then as an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School. In 2015, she left to become a Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and serve as the director of the CIRCLE Lab

Margaret is the 2025 Flux’s new Linda Spears winner, awarded to outstanding Mid-career researchers and it was a privilege having her for a short interview, asking her about her research, her scientific pathway and maybe some tips for students and young faculty members regarding their scientific career.

Tell me a little bit about your professional trajectory. 

I was a psych major at Michigan State University & loved my cognitive science courses but also wanted to work in a helping profession, so I was interested in clinical psychology. I had done a senior honors thesis with Joel Nigg and Tom Carr a clinical and cognitive psychologist, on ADHD. My honors advisor was Jim Zachs and I talked with him at the end of undergrad about how excited I was about the new cognitive neuroscience methods that were coming out at that time (I graduated in 1999). Because of this I was lucky enough to get a job working with Randy Buckner & Jeff Zachs at Washington University in St. Loius as a research assistant. Wash U was an incredible place to be at that time (and always!) the field of cog neuro was leaping forward and I had a front row seat to the scientific excitement and discovery. I applied to clinical psychology programs to study ADHD. Because no one who worked in a clinical psychology department was using neuroimaging to study ADHD, I focused on programs where I thought I might also be able to learn neuroimaging. I ended up at the University of California, Berkeley for graduate school working with Steve Hinshaw but I also worked my way into Mark D'Esposito's lab by being willing work on any research project and working as hard as possible. I loved Berkeley - I got incredible training in Mark's lab, was again surrounded by a lot of scientific discovery joy, and got an excellent education in clinical psychology. At the end of graduate school I worked with some folks in public health, in particular Tom Boyce, a visionary researcher who was bringing together social epidemiology and neuroscience. He taught me about the idea of 'biologic embedding' - the concept that social experiences get under the skin and impact how we develop physically - including our brains. This concept combined well with what I'd learned already as a developmental psychopathologist. After doing a clinical internship at Bellevue Hospital in New York, I applied to become a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar and matched with Harvard's School of Public Health for postdoc. My three years as an RWJ scholar were incredible - the program was this amazing interdisciplinary group focused on understanding social inequality in health. It was inspiring, mind-bending, and it pushed me to really think about what I could contribute. Everything I've done since then is basically RWJ meets developmental cognitive neuroscience. I also met my good buddy and collaborator, Kate McLaughlin as a postdoc doc and we developed some theories together. In addition to working at the school of public health I worked with Chuck Nelson (Children's Hospital/Harvard Medical School) and John Gabrieli (MIT). Those were more incredible mentors, excellent labs, and people who really pushed my thinking in new, I hope positive directions. After working at Children's Hospital for a few years on a K award, I decided to try my luck on the academic job market and landed at UNC where I've been for 10 years!

What motivated you to go into your particular area of research? 

When I learned about health inequality and social epidemiology (the observation that health is strongly patterned by social inequity) I felt like I'd found a problem that matched my values and for which my passion for understanding the developing brain could be useful. I study brain development b/c I'm just interested in how brains work and develop, I am inherently fascinated by neuroscience questions. But from the very beginning I've wanted to see that my science is values-aligned. Understanding how marginalized folks in our society are affected, and hopefully identifying or making concrete, structural, and individual avenues of intervention is something I think is worth spending my life doing.

If you had to turn back the wheel, would there be any change you would make in your career? That includes an additional (or less) specialty or training? 

Man. I've had a pretty sweet ride. It's hard to think about anything I would change at this point. I think mostly I would tell my younger self to chill out, have more self-confidence, don't be petty, just stay the course and do the science. Worry less, learn more. I have all kinds of attitudinal advice for my younger self but I love the training choices she made:)

If you were trapped in an elevator, how would you describe your research to the person you are trapped with?

I study how experiences that kids have shape brain development and how that leads to risk for mental health problems.

If you weren't talking to developmental cognitive neuroscientists, how would you describe your most proud scientific accomplishment?

I think either way I'd say this: My greatest scientific accomplishment are studies where I've shown, with causal inference, that specific experiences matter for long-term brain and behavioral development. We know generally that experience is important to how we think and what we care about, but we know very little about why exactly that is. We don't really know how experiences that we have as kids shape how we think and feel - we just know that generally it seems to matter. But we really need to know what matters for kids brain development,  when, and how it matters because if we don't, we might focus on the wrong things. We might make kids practice sitting still in church but not practice how to tell when their friend's upset. Or we might not make kids sit still in church because it is old fashioned when that is actually a great way to develop self-regulation. Learning which kinds of experiences matter and in what ways is the only way we can understand brain development or child development.

What do you think are the most pressing issues in the developmental cognitive neuroscience field for your area of interest? For the field in general?. 

I always think cognitive neuroscience, including developmental cognitive neuroscience, should be figuring out how the mind arises from the brain. I think that means constantly re-thinking how we conceptualize components of cognition and emotion and re-thinking how these are linked with brain function and development. Relatedly - I think we need to better understand plasticity. Developmental plasticity is one key reason why developing brains are different than adult brains - we should understand it better in humans and, near to my own heart, we should understand how and when experience impacts and shapes brain development through plasticity mechanisms.

What do you think is the future of developmental cognitive neuroscience regarding basic research and on the translational level?

This is always both/and. We don't know how the brain works or develops yet so we can't just go apply our knowledge. On the other hand, if we never see the diversity of development, the variousness of humans, if we don't try to apply our ideas to the real world, we'll never have very interesting or novel discoveries. Basic research and translating basic research to the edge cases (disease processes, tails of the distribution) is just a constant feedforward/feedback loop. We need each other.

I think of how there are physicists and engineers. Engineers apply physics (and chemistry, and etc) to solve real world problems. All neuroscientists are physicists. We don't have engineers in our field yet b/c we don't know enough to "just" apply knowledge. Our science is so young, that all "application" is also going to be discovery.

Do you have any advice you’d like to share with the trainees in our community who are interested in pursuing developmental cognitive neuroscience research?

Please do it. We need you. There is so much more to learn and we need people learning it. We're still in a massive proliferation period, we'll be discovering things for a long time. Longer than my career or yours, we need generations of scientists to help us understand the brain. Please roll up your sleeves and get on the team.

Please join us at the Flux 2025 meeting in Dublin, to learn more about Dr Sheridan’s fascinating journey! Congratulations, Margaret for this well-deserved award!