Giorgia Picci, Ph.D., Named Haddix Endowed Chair in Developmental Neuroscience
Thursday, March 6, 2025
Boys Town is pleased to announce that Giorgia Picci, Ph.D., has been named the Susan and George Haddix Endowed Chair in Developmental Neuroscience. Dr. Picci is the Director of the Cognitive Affective Neurodevelopment in Youth (CANDY) Laboratory at the Boys Town National Research Hospital Institute for Human Neuroscience. Her research primarily focuses on how early life experiences, such as adversity and trauma exposure, influence neurodevelopment trajectories and adolescent mental health. The goal is to understand how childhood trauma and pubertal development impact adolescents' neural structure, function and adaptation to life.
“Findings show that if children are in unsafe environments, their bodies can undergo different developmental trajectories – either a quicker or slower pace of development. That's important because puberty instigates a cascade of neurodevelopmental changes and opens a window of risk for mental health problems. It's also a huge window of opportunity for intervention," Dr. Picci said. “It's this prime window that we're interested in studying so that we can help set up trajectories for kids to be healthier in the long term by identifying where these pivot points are that are really influential on mental health."
Dr. Picci has authored more than 35 peer-reviewed publications, featured in such premier outlets as
PNAS, Psychological Science, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience and NeuroImage. During her Ph.D. at Pennsylvania State University, Dr. Picci's work was among the first to demonstrate that puberty impacts how teens perceive peer faces at a basic perceptual level. As a post-doctoral fellow, Dr. Picci's research focused on two areas: the normative patterns of neurodevelopment, including effects of pubertal hormones, and how early life stress may modify neurodevelopmental trajectories and risk for psychopathology.
Dr. Picci joined as faculty at the Institute for Human Neuroscience in 2023. In the CANDY Laboratory, her work continues to emphasize examining multiple levels of biology, including hormones, s/fMRI (structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging) and MEG (magnetoencephalography). “Our lab is very proud of the fact that we're able to integrate multiple levels of biology and how they can influence mental health," Dr. Picci said.
Boys Town's ongoing commitment to enhancing translational pediatric neuroscience research – which means directly applying research discoveries made in the lab to improve outcomes in behavioral healthcare – was a driving force behind the creation of this endowed research chair in 2018. For generous benefactors George and Susan Haddix, this new era of neurobehavioral research coupled his interest in science and technology with her passion for helping children and families.
For more than 25 years, Susan Haddix has worked to help at-risk children and adolescents in the Omaha community. She has been a long-time volunteer and board member with the Child Savings Institute. She also serves on the Nebraska Foster Care Review Board and the more recently formed Probation Review Board. In 2018, she joined the Boys Town National Board of Trustees, serving on their national youth care committee. George Haddix, Ph.D., has been a prominent leader in computer engineering and software, having served as CEO for PKWare Inc., Applied Communications, CSG Systems International and US West.
“This endowed chair is an incredible honor because the Haddix family has such a long history of work in this space," Dr. Picci said. “The work Susan Haddix does is so impactful in a direct way for kids, so I think it's wonderful that they also see the value of research and how we can inform the spectrum of basic to translational understanding of early life stress. It's really an inspiration for our lab to be able to do this work in the Haddix name and carry on their tradition of being engaged with and serving at-risk youth."
