Wan-Ling Tseng, PhD

Dr. Wan-Ling Tseng is an Assistant Professor at the Yale Child Study Center. She received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota and completed her postdoctoral fellowship in the Section on Mood Dysregulation and Neuroscience at the National Institute of Mental Health. Her research focuses on understanding the brain mechanisms mediating abnormal psychological processes associated with irritability and aggression in children and adolescents and how these behaviors and symptoms change over time. Dr. Tseng's current work, funded by her NIH Pathway to Independence Award (K99/R00), uses machine learning, a data-driven computational approach, to investigate the neural mechanisms of childhood irritability. Her goal is to understand individual differences in how children process frustrating events, how frustration affects the neural mechanisms underlying attention and other cognitive function, and how these processes are associated with irritability symptoms. She studies irritability using multiple levels of analysis (e.g., brain, behavior, social/experiential factors, environment) in order to gain a comprehensive understanding of the etiology and development of irritability. In addition to her recent K99/R00 Award, Dr. Tseng’s work has been recognized by other prestigious awards and organizations including the Society of Biological Psychiatry Travel Award (2015), Career Development Institute for Bipolar Disorder (2015), NIH Fellows Award for Research Excellence (2015), NIMH OFT Trainee Travel Award (2016), American College of Neuropsychopharmacology Travel Award (2021), Doris Duke Fund to Retain Clinical Scientists (2021), and Charles H. Hood Foundation Child Health Research Award (2022).

Dr. Tseng is an active member of the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) Action Group at the Yale Child Study Center, Yale School of Medicine. She believes that diversity fosters creativity, enriches research, and is crucial for scientific progress and discovery. Dr. Tseng is fully committed to efforts toward a more inclusive, equitable, and diverse working space and environment. She has been training and mentoring (and will continue to train and mentor) a diverse body of students entering the field of developmental psychopathology and translational clinical neuroscience.