Center for Advancing Research and Solutions for Society

Pregnancy is an important transitional time, when a woman harkens back to how she was mothered and begins to form a maternal identity shaped by her childhood experience.  But just as loving and connected parenting provides a template for becoming a loving and connected parent, abuse can set the stage for generation after generation of relationship and parenting difficulties.
CARSS is pleased to announce start-up support for a new project, Pregnancy & Traumatic Stress, which commits an interdisciplinary and multi-national team to finding interventions that will help new mothers and mothers-to-be break the cycles of trauma. The project, led by University of Michigan nursing associate professor Julia Seng, will include researchers in Australia and the United Kingdom. 

University of Michigan adjunct assistant professor Stephanie Brown, co-author of the recently published
book Moving Beyond Self-Interest: Perspectives from Evolutionary Biology, Neuroscience, and the Social
Sciences (Oxford University Press, 2012), will speak this summer at a groundbreaking international
conference that looks at the science behind human compassion.

Along with Brown, whose work in this area began as a CARSS project, several others who authored chapters
in the book (Sue Carter, Dacher Keltner, Stephen Porges) are also slated to speak at The Science of
Compassion: Origins, Measures and Interventions July 19-22 in Telluride, Colo.

Many thanks to those who responded to our call for projects in Detroit and Southeast Michigan. We asked for creative, breakthrough solutions to entrenched social problems and several investigators delivered, with projects that take on social issues in realms that include education, health and the green economy. We look forward to reviewing the requested final proposals by April 15. Awards will be announced in early May.