Minnesota Center for Twin and Family Research

Congratulations to Tony Graham, MCTFR Research Data Manager, for receiving the 2025 Psychology Staff Excellence Award!

Anthony Graham and Mary Simonsen Receive the 2025 Psychology Staff Excellence Award Congratulations to Anthony Graham and Mary Simonsen for being the 2025 Staff Excellence Award Recipients.

The Colorado-Minnesota Parents, Adolescents, Temperament, and Health Study (COMN PATHS) seeks to better understand adolescent development, including individual (temperament) and contextual (parents, families, peers, schools, neighborhoods, communities) risk and protective factors for cognitive, behavioral, social, and emotional functioning. The purpose of the study is to address questions regarding intergenerational transmission of behaviors and the effects of ma*****na legalization. The PATHS Study is the first study, to our knowledge, examining effects of ma*****na legalization on parents and families. The COMN PATHS Study is a phase of our COMN (Colorado-Minnesota) Study, which began in 2017 and assessed the impact of cannabis legalization.
To learn more, visit our website below! https://mctfr.psych.umn.edu/current-research/comn-paths

Twins are very important to science!

By studying identical and fraternal twins and their families, researchers at the MCTFR can investigate how genes and the environment influence aspects of health and development. Identical (monozygotic) twins share the same genes, while fraternal (dizygotic) twins share 50% of their genes. While identical and fraternal twins differ in the amount of shared genes, they share common life experiences (e.g. having grown up together). Studying twins allows researchers to learn how alike or different members of a twin pair are, and it allows us to determine how genes and the environment influence countless factors including relationships, attachment, personality, and cognitive and physical health.

The MCTFR Infant Twin Registry is currently locating and enrolling twins born in Minnesota after 2020! Enrolled families may be contacted for future research on (for example) neurobehavioral development during infancy and early childhood, infant and child temperament, and parent-child relationships. We are excited that MCTFR has become a lifespan center, with twins ranging in age from 2 months to nearly 90 years!
To find out more about MCTFR’s Infant Twin Registry, visit our website below:
https://mctfr.psych.umn.edu/current-research/infant-twin-registry-itr

Check out the newsletter that was mailed out recently to our SIBS (Sibling Interaction and Behavior Study) participants!

The MCTFR is lucky to have many long-term staff members - read about four of them here!

https://cla.umn.edu/psychology/news-events/story/mctfrs-longitudinal-staff

📣Resource Spotlight:
NAMI Minnesota provides mental health support by helping people navigate the system, identify resources, and provides a safe community for all. To access their main website, follow this link:
https://namimn.org/

Other NAMI Info:
NAMI MN Helpline: 651-645-2948, ext. 117 (local) or 1-888-NAMI-HELPS (6264-43577)
*NOT A CRISIS LINE*
Email: [email protected]

Meet Neely! Neely Miller received her Masters in Public Health degree in Maternal and Child Health from the University of Minnesota, and has been a researcher at the University of Minnesota since 2003. Prior to joining the MCTFR, her work focused on using event-related potentials to assess brain function in children and overseeing research operations in a collaborative, interdisciplinary research center.

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) created a website dedicated to the middle school age group. The site contains interactive activities to help parents, caregivers, and teachers of middle school students introduce and reinforce key messages about peer pressure, resistance skills, and other important topics related to
underage drinking.

Learn more here: https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohols-effects-health/niaaa-middle-school

The ABCD Study has gathered resources to help with job and school applications as well as information about drug usage and what to do in an emergency. Check out these resources at https://abcdstudy.org/youth-resources/ or scan the QR code in the post!

Researchers using the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study data have found negative causal outcomes from screen time and beneficial causal outcomes from reading. For more information, check out the article "Causal Relationships Between Screen Use, Reading, and
Brain Development in Early Adolescents"!

https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.202307540