Rate My Professor Susan Perlman

Susan Perlman, PhD, serves as Professor of Psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Director of the Laboratory for Child Brain Development. She obtained her B.A. in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2002, an M.A. in Developmental Psychology in 2006, and a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience from Duke University in 2009. Affiliated with the Division of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, the Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center, and the Institute of Clinical and Translational Sciences, her career centers on pioneering research in developmental cognitive neuroscience at Washington University.

Dr. Perlman's multi-modal research program integrates social and cognitive development with social, cognitive, and affective neuroscience. Utilizing techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), psychophysiological measures, eye tracking, and behavioral questionnaires, she examines the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying emotion development and its influence on social interactions in infancy and early childhood. Her work targets the preschool period to pinpoint temperament profiles signaling risk for psychopathology, enabling early interventions amid peak brain plasticity. Additional studies address children exposed to opioids in utero and those with autism spectrum disorder. She has received the NARSAD Young Investigator Award in 2016 and the National Institute of Mental Health Biobehavioral Research Award for Innovative New Scientists (BRAINS) in 2015. Prominent publications include "Review: Defining Positive Emotion Dysregulation: Integrating Temperamental and Clinical Perspectives" (Vogel et al., Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 2023), "A network approach to the investigation of childhood irritability: probing frustration using social stimuli" (Thompson et al., Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines, 2024), "Irritability Moderates the Association between Cognitive Flexibility Task Performance and Related Prefrontal Cortex Activation in Young Children" (Li et al., Brain Sciences, 2023), "Constructing the “Family Personality”: Can Family Functioning Be Linked to Parent–Child Interpersonal Neural Synchronization?" (Thompson et al., Journal of Personality, 2025), and "Setting boundaries: Development of neural and behavioral event cognition in early childhood" (Benear et al., Developmental Science, 2023). With approximately 4,900 citations across 79 research outputs, her contributions profoundly shape early childhood mental health research.