Candice Odgers

Odgers attended Athol Murray College of Notre Dame, an athletically themed boarding school, for a year. She then moved to a nearby city and was the first in her family to complete high school.

Odgers decided to seek a career in criminology and psychology. Due to her affiliation with her athletics, she spent 4 years recovering from an incident and underwent psychical therapy. Following her recovery, she obtained a Honors and Masters level degree from Simon Frauser University in 2001. Odgers was originally completing her PhD at Cambridge University through a Commonwealth Scholarship but was inspired by American Professor Dick Reppucci, to pursue a PhD in psychology at the University of Virginia, which she earned in 2005. Repucci and Odgers began researching the importance of social settings in child development. With Marlene Moretti, Odgers also co-lead a multi site study on juvenile justice settings and the health problems that occurred.

She underwent a postdoctoral training between 2005–07 in England at the Social, Genetic, & Developmental Psychiatry Centre with Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi. Odgers would soon create a 'genes-to-geography' archive for 2,232 children from the Environmental-Risk Longitudinal Twin Study. In 2007, Odgers moved back to the United States and earned a faculty position at the University of California, Irvine. Two projects were launched under her supervision: miLife Stud, which focused on social adversity, and the second being supported by Google where Odgers utilized the Google Street View to capture key details in children's neighborhoods. Odgers began working at the University of California, Irvine in 2007 as an Assistant Professor and worked as an Associate Professor from 2011–12. She then worked as Associate Director at the Center for Child and Family Policy of Duke University from 2012–2016. In 2012, Odgers took the position in the Sanford School of Public Policy and the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University. Odgers became a Fellow, for the Association for Psychological Science in 2013, and a Fellow at the Child Brain & Development Program Canadian Institute for Advanced Research in 2016. She is currently working as a psychology professor at the University of California-Irvine and the Duke University.[12][13][14]

Odgers' work focuses on how social inequalities and difficulties at a young age may affect the psychological tendencies of individuals. Additionally, her research demonstrates the positive results of modern technology on new generations.[15]

Odgers fields of study includes the mental health of children, inequities in social interactions, and the effects of monetary and social stress on the psychological well being of adolescent.[11] Odgers researched the effects of childhood experiences and trauma, and focused on finding a link between childhood memories and the development of psychological issues in adults.

One of the studies she conducted focused on the epidemiological aspects of nature and nurture in adolescents, and whether childhood experiences or adolescent growth lead to psychological issues, and the health issues that accompany them. Odgers and her peers, Avshalom Caspi and Jonathan M. Broadbent, examined case studies on 1037 children, who were periodically observed at different points in their lives, and were assessed to see if they would display any signs of offensive behaviors. Odgers' research supported a link between childhood experiences and trauma with the development of psychological issues, and that preemptively resolving these issues in children would prevent various complications later in their adulthood.

The results of Odger and her peers' experiment, published in 2007, yielded various conclusions regarding Conduct Disorder (CD), and it supported the claims made in the DSM IV regarding the development of CD in young children and the necessary preventive steps and treatment required to resolve CD. The questions that remain following the experiment regard whether the groups of children with CD can be categorized and effectively treated, and whether or not the symptoms displayed by each individual can signify a different subdivision of CD. These questions and results from the experiment gave rise to future experiments that were to be conducted for the DSM V.[16]

Other studies Odgers conducted focused on examining the link between stress and cortisol responses among adolescents and childhood trauma. Published in 2011, Odgers and her peers conducted a study, with 190 participants all children the age of 12, which examined issues the children may have encountered at the age of 5, in order to identify a link between childhood maltreatment and current cortisol responses. Parents and teachers disclosed information on each of the children through reports to the researchers, and it was concluded that children who were maltreated or bullied at young ages displayed notably lower cortisol responses to stress, in comparison to the children who were not maltreated. The experiment's results supported the notion that childhood trauma has a direct effect on how children cope with stress, and is associated with negative effects to the reactivity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA). Odgers and her peers concluded that in order to avoid further complications regarding an individual's cortisol responses, and the reactivity of their HPA, childhood trauma would need to be reduced and monitored.[17]

• Nagin, D. S., & Odgers, C. L. (2010). Group-based trajectory modeling in clinical research. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 6, 109–138.
• Odgers, Candice L., Avshalom Caspi, Michael A. Russell, Robert J. Sampson, Louise Arseneault, and Terrie E. Moffitt. (2012). Supportive parenting mediates neighborhood socioeconomic disparities in children's antisocial behavior from ages 5 to 12. Development and Psychopathology, 24(3), 705–721.
• Odgers, C. L., Caspi, A., Broadbent, J. M., Dickson, N., Hancox, R. J., Harrington, H., ... & Moffitt, T. E. (2007). Prediction of differential adult health burden by conduct problem subtypes in males. Archives of General Psychiatry, 64(4), 476–484.
• Piquero, A. R., Fagan, J., Mulvey, E. P., Steinberg, L., & Odgers, C. (2005). Developmental trajectories of legal socialization among serious adolescent offenders. Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, 96(1), 267.

• Faculty page
• Candice Odgers publications indexed by Google Scholar