Leigh Gayle Goetschius

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Data Scientist at The Hilltop Institute at University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Objective To evaluate whether race‐ and sex‐based biases are present in a predictive model of avoidable hospital (AH) events. Study Setting and Design We examined whether Medicare fee‐for‐service (FFS) beneficiaries in Maryland with similar risk scores differed in true AH event risk on the basis of race or sex ( n = 324,834). This was operationali...

Mother–child closeness, a mutually trusting and affectionate bond, is an important factor in shaping positive youth development. However, little is known about the neural pathways through which mother–child closeness is related to brain organization. Utilizing a longitudinal sample primarily from low-income families (N = 181; 76% African American y...

Background Racial inequities in severe maternal morbidity (SMM) and mortality constitute a public health crisis in the United States. Doula care, defined as care from birth workers who provide culturally appropriate, non-clinical support during pregnancy and postpartum, has been proposed as an intervention to help disrupt obstetric racism as a driv...

Introduction: Predictive models have proliferated in the health system in recent years and have been used to predict both health services utilization and medical outcomes. Less is known, however, on how these models function and how they might adapt to different contexts. The purpose of the current study is to shed light on the inner workings of a...

Youth antisocial behavior (AB) is associated with deficits in socioemotional processing, reward and threat processing, and executive functioning. These deficits are thought to emerge from differences in neural structure, functioning, and connectivity, particularly within the default, salience, and frontoparietal networks. However, the relationship...

Predictive analytics are used in primary care to efficiently direct health care resources to high-risk patients to prevent unnecessary health care utilization and improve health. Social determinants of health (SDOH) are important features in these models, but they are poorly measured in administrative claims data. Area-level SDOH can be proxies for...

Unstable and unpredictable environments are linked to risk for psychopathology, but the underlying neural mechanisms that explain how instability relate to subsequent mental health concerns remain unclear. In particular, few studies have focused on the association between instability and white matter structures despite white matter playing a crucia...

Background Stressful events, such as the COVID‐19 pandemic, are major contributors to anxiety and depression, but only a subset of individuals develop psychopathology. In a population‐based sample (N = 174) with a high representation of marginalized individuals, this study examined adolescent functional network connectivity as a marker of susceptib...

The ventral striatum (VS) is implicated in reward processing and motivation. Human and non-human primate studies demonstrate that the VS and prefrontal cortex (PFC), which comprise the frontostriatal circuit, interact to influence motivated behavior. However, there is a lack of research that precisely maps and quantifies VS–PFC white matter tracts....

Accumulating literature has linked poverty to brain structure and function, particularly in affective neural regions; however, few studies have examined associations with structural connections or the importance of developmental timing of exposure. Moreover, prior neuroimaging studies have not used a proximal measure of poverty (i.e., material hard...

School connectedness, a construct indexing supportive school relationships, has been posited to promote resilience to environmental adversity. Consistent with prominent calls in the field, we examined the protective nature of school connectedness against two dimensions of early adversity that index multiple levels of environmental exposure (violenc...

Ecological stress during adolescent development may increase the sensitivity to negative emotional processes that can contribute to the onset and progression of internalizing behaviors during preadolescence. Although a small number of studies have considered the link among the relations between ecological stress, amygdala reactivity and internalizi...

Dimensions of early adversity, such as violence exposure and social deprivation, may have different effects associated with socioemotional functioning in the developing brain and different factors may be protective. This dissertation examined the downstream effects of childhood violence exposure and social deprivation in data from the Fragile Famil...

[This is a Stage 2 Registered Report that is currently under review. Stage 1 was reviewed and accepted in March 2020 (https://osf.io/46yru)] Ecological stress during adolescent development may increase the sensitivity to negative emotional processes that can contribute to the onset and progression of internalizing behaviors during preadolescence. A...

Background Childhood adversity is, unfortunately, highly prevalent and strongly associated with later psychopathology. Recent theories posit that two dimensions of early adversity, threat and deprivation, have distinct effects on brain development. The current study evaluated whether violence exposure (threat) and social deprivation (deprivation) w...

Importance: Adverse childhood experiences are a public health issue with negative sequelae that persist throughout life. Current theories suggest that adverse childhood experiences reflect underlying dimensions (eg, violence exposure and social deprivation) with distinct neural mechanisms; however, research findings have been inconsistent, likely...

Childhood adversity is heterogeneous with potentially distinct dimensions of violence exposure and social deprivation. These dimensions may differentially shape emotion-based neural circuitry, such as amygdala–PFC white matter connectivity. Amygdala–orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) white matter connectivity has been linked to regulation of the amygdala’s...

The amygdala is critically involved in processing emotion. Through bidirectional connections, the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is hypothesized to influence amygdala reactivity. However, research that elucidates the nature of amygdala-PFC interactions - through mapping amygdala-prefrontal tracts, quantifying variability among tracts, and linking this var...

The primary aim of this research was to determine how modulation of the visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) by emotionally laden faces is related to autism spectrum personality traits. Emotionally neutral faces served as the standard stimuli and happy and sad expressions served as vMMN-eliciting deviants. Consistent with prior research, it was antici...