Minnesota Center for Twin and Family Research

Do adoptive and non-adoptive families differ in terms of connectedness? Results from our SIBS study indicate that adoptive families are just as connected as non-adoptive families.

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study is the largest long-term study of brain development and child health in the United States. The ABCD Research Consortium includes 21 research sites across the country, which have invited 11,880 children ages 9-10 to join the study. Researchers will track their biological and behavioral development through adolescence into young adulthood. Using cutting-edge technology, scientists will determine how childhood experiences (such as sports, video games, social media, unhealthy sleep patterns, and smoking) interact with each other and with a child’s changing biology to affect brain development and social, behavioral, academic, health, and other outcomes.
The ABCD study is in its 8th year at the University of Minnesota, following participants into young adulthood. For more information about the ABCD study, visit our website at
https://z.umn.edu/arz3

The MCTFR was recently featured by the College of Liberal Arts! A huge thank you to our participants and staff for making our research possible for the last 35 years.

Minnesota Center for Twin and Family Research: Tracking Psychological Development for 35 Years UMN's landmark twin research center has followed 10,000+ pairs for decades, creating a treasure trove of data that has produced nearly 900 scientific publications.

Check out the newsletter that was mailed out recently to our MTR (Minnesota Multi-Ethnic Twin Registry) and CAATSA (Carolina African American Twin Study of Aging) participants!

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

The Minnesota Center for Twin and Family Research received a $6.7 million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to fund the research project “The Effects of Cannabis Legalization and Persistent Use: A Longitudinal Study of Two Twin Cohorts”.

The team, led by Scott Vrieze and Sylia Wilson, in collaboration with the University of Colorado, will continue assessments of >4000 twins born in Minnesota and Colorado to study the psychological and social consequences of recreational ma*****na legalization in the United States.

Link to the full story: https://cla.umn.edu/psychology/news-events/story/mctfr-investigators-awarded-grant-nida

The Minnesota Center for Twin and Family Research received a $6.7 million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to fund the research project “The Effects of Cannabis Legalization and Persistent Use: A Longitudinal Study of Two Twin Cohorts”. The team, led by Scott Vrieze and Sylia Wilson, in collaboration with the University of Colorado, will continue assessments of >4000 twins born in Minnesota and Colorado to study the psychological and social consequences of recreational ma*****na legalization in the United States. Link to the full story: https://cla.umn.edu/psychology/news-events/story/mctfr-investigators-awarded-grant-nida