Curtin PANDA Lab

The Probabilistic and Nonlinear Dynamical Applications (PANDA) lab investigates new perspectives on causality in human development.

The hyper-connected nature of the modern world means that just about everything is connected, and nothing is independent; so how can any one thing cause another?

To answer this question, the PANDA lab measures human systems at all kinds of scales, from the chemical and cellular to the biological, behavioral, social, and cultural. Led by Paul Curtin, PhD, the PANDA lab develops and applies tools from systems biology, biostatistics, and computational neuroscience to connect these systems, and learn how information flows between them.

The PANDA lab’s ultimate goal is to elucidate the process of healthy neurodevelopment, and to develop tools that can detect, predict, and avoid unhealthy development.

The current focus of this work is untangling the bidirectional impacts of early relational health on later neurodevelopmental outcomes in childhood. This includes collaboration with the center’s TiMES lab to analyze biomarker trends; and InSynC lab to analyze microsecond parent/caregiver-child interactions.