Maureen Zalewski, who joined the faculty of the University of Oregon in September as an assistant professor, has won the 2013 Victoria S. Levin Award for Early Career Success in Young Children's Mental Health Research.

The UO's Department of Psychology now boasts two of the three winners of the award since its inception by the Society for Research in Child Development. Last year, Heidemarie Laurent was chosen while at the University of Wyoming, shortly before she returned to the UO, where she had served for two years as a postdoctoral researcher.

Zalewski was chosen for her research on the development of emotion and stress reactivity and regulation in the context of borderline personality disorder. Her work, the society's citation added, "focuses on how emotionally dysregulated parenting and mothers' own trauma experiences influence the physiological and behavioral indicators of children's developing emotion and stress capacities.

Zalewski earned a doctorate in child clinical psychology in 2012 from the University of Washington. She also holds bachelor's and master's degrees, respectively, from Pennsylvania State University and the University of Washington. She completed a one-year fellowship, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center before coming to the UO.

The award honors Levin's 30 years of distinguished service at the National Institutes of Health, where Levin fostered scientific research that addressed children's mental health.

- by Jim Barlow, UO Office of Strategic Communications