Sarah Enos Watamura

Dr. Sarah Enos Watamura is Professor and Chair of the Psychology Department at the University of Denver where she directs the Child Health & Development Lab and co-directs the Stress, Early Experience and Development (SEED) Research Center. After training with Megan Gunnar, PhD, at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development, she received her PhD from the Department of Human Development at Cornell University in 2005. She has longstanding interests in children¹s physiologic regulation, their development within caregiving contexts, and in understanding mechanisms and trajectories from early life stress to later physical health, mental health, cognitive/educational, and socio-emotional outcomes. Her work focuses on the unique stressors and buffers in families experiencing poverty and among newly immigrated and refugee families and includes testing promising intervention approaches. Recent projects test and develop interventions to support families facing adversity, including those that target the wellbeing of the adults in children’s lives who themselves may have history of adversity.