CSC welcomes Dr. Rina Das Eiden

We are delighted to welcome Dr. Rina Das Eiden as a new faculty affiliate at the Child Study Center!

Rina is a Professor in the Developmental Area of the Psychology Department, and she is the first faculty to join Penn State as a result of the Consortium to Combat Substance Abuse hiring initiatives.  She obtained her Ph.D. in Applied Developmental Psychology from the University of Maryland in 1992. Rina was a Senior Research Scientist at the Research Institute on Addictions at University of Buffalo, where she also held various adjunct positions in the Departments of Pediatrics, Psychology, and Community Health and Health Behavior from 1995 to 2019.

Rina’s work focuses on the effects of parental substance use on children’s developmental trajectories, as well as early childhood intervention in the prevention of substance use. She has conducted several longitudinal cohort studies examining processes by which parental prenatal and postnatal substance use impacts parenting and youth outcomes from pregnancy through adolescence. Her work has examined multiple mechanisms that confer risk or promote resilience, including parenting, child temperament, and peer mechanisms. She uses multiple methods in her research, including observational measures of family processes and physiological measures of arousal and regulation. In collaboration with Dr. Mark Feinberg in the College of Health and Human Development, Dr. Stephanie Godleski at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Drs. Kurt Dermen and Craig Colder at the University at Buffalo, she will test an augmented version of the Family Foundations prevention program that incorporates a brief intervention that addresses alcohol problems.

Please join us in welcoming Rina!