Dr. Alexandrea Craft is an Assistant Professor (Research) in the Department of Pediactrics and Psychiatry & Human Behavior. She is also a Research Scientist at the Brown Center for the Study of Children at Risk (BCC) at Women and Infants Hospital. She earned her PhD in Clinical Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and completed a clinical internship/residency at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. She also completed an NIMH T32 Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University in the Brown Center at Women and Infants Hospital.
Dr. Craft's research focuses on understanding how early adversity is experienced psychologically and physically by mothers and fathers during the prenatal period, and how adversity is transmitted to infants through parents’ behaviors and stress hormones during the perinatal period. She is currently the PI of an NIH Director's Early Independence Award (DP5) grant that is focused on understanding the transition to parenthood for parents of medically compromised infants in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). This project aims to understand how work conditions and work-family obligations impact parents ability to participate in NICU care and, in turn, their preterm infant's neurodevelopment.
She has specific expertise is in parent’s work conditions, parental mental health, Infant and early child development, and family systems including interracial/multiracial families and intergenrational families.
Dr. Craft is also a licensed clinical psychologist at the Brown Center for Children and Families at WIH where she provides evidence-based psychological treatment to young children and their families. Her clinical expertise includes perinatal mental health, NICU psychology and infant mental health. Her services include behavioral parent training, family therapy, and neuropsychological assesments for learning disabilities and ASD in children zero to five years old.
