By Shannon Turgeon
Photography by Joshua Franzos
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common neurodevelopmental disorders.
However, it is typically diagnosed in school-aged children; and studies have shown that by the time of diagnosis, there can already be negative academic, familial and social impacts.
Heather Joseph, associate professor of psychiatry and of pediatrics, School of Medicine, is working to change this by studying parents with ADHD and their young children—infants and toddlers—to try to identify early risk markers for ADHD before diagnosis.
Her research could lead to preventive interventions that could eventually help to reduce impairment and mitigate comorbidities for children with ADHD.
On Friday, Aug. 14, Joseph will present “Early Signals of Inattention in Neonates and Infants at Familial Risk for ADHD” as part of the 2026 Senior Vice Chancellor’s Research Seminar Series. (Join the lecture here.)
Joseph has been interested in child psychiatry since she was in middle school, but a rotation at a lab that studied ADHD and autism during her final year of medical school led her to focus her career on psychiatric research.
She discovered that she enjoyed studying the ties between parent-child interactions, parenting interventions and pharmacology for those disorders, but early prevention remained at the root of her interest.
“Everything I’ve done has reinforced that I enjoy working with families with ADHD, but really I see myself as an early risk researcher: interested in preventing childhood psychopathology and the transmission of mental health issues in families,” she said.
Her work involves a combination of research tools and methods: behavioral observations of parent and child interactions; neurodevelopmental assessments and tasks of attention in infants; and functional near-infrared spectroscopy, a neuroimaging procedure that measures brain activity.
Her research has identified early behaviors, task performance and neural markers that could signal an increased likelihood for developing ADHD.
“We’ve found some early markers suggesting that infants with more negative affect or less effortful control are at greater risk of developing ADHD. We also found some support for our hypothesis around the attention task, so infants with less optimal attention on these tasks were more likely to have parents with ADHD,” said Joseph.
Based on these findings, Joseph’s work has also shifted toward assisting parents who have ADHD.
“We’re finding that there is a lot of parenting distress among parents with ADHD, so we’ve started to focus on that... About two years ago, I received an award to develop an intervention for expectant women with ADHD, to try to prevent, even earlier, the challenges that are transmitted through parents with ADHD to their infants,” she said.
Joseph is collaborating with labs throughout the United States and around the world to develop an international consortium for early ADHD risk and establish the facts, unknowns and potential avenues to move forward with this research.
“There’s a lot of blame that parents place on themselves, and these disorders are highly heritable, so there’s a good chance that if you have ADHD, your child will too. If we can break that cycle of blame and self-doubt, we can help parents be the best parents they can be, and enhance the opportunity for their child to thrive as well,” she said.
“Coming at it from both angles—treating parental ADHD and supporting children for optimal brain development—is my goal.”