Does Changing the Social Environment in Early Childhood Matter? Emerging Causal Evidence from Pakistan

Joanna Maselko, UNC-CH

Joanna (‘Asia’) Maselko is a social and psychiatric epidemiologist whose research aims to identify mechanisms through which the social environment impacts the development of common neuropsychiatric disorders. Anchored in a life-course developmental framework, a large portion of her research focuses on the intergenerational transmission of risk and the role of the environment in altering socio-emotional and cognitive developmental trajectories.

Dr. Maselko is currently the PI of the SHARE CHILD study, a cluster RCT set in rural Pakistan, whose goal is to investigate mechanisms through which maternal depression, and its treatment, impacts child development in the first three years of life. A central question is to examine heterogeneity of treatment effects by social contextual factors such as socioeconomic status, family composition, and parenting.

A separate line of research focuses on religious engagement and health, with a special interest on how gender, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status affect this relationship over the lifecourse.

The majority of Dr. Maselko’s research is located in South Asia, with the broad goal of expanding the field of social and psychiatric epidemiology globally through anchoring research in a cross-cultural context and addressing disparities in global health