As the head of the REID Lab at Northeastern University, I’m thrilled that you’re considering joining our team of researchers. Unfortunately, I'm unable to hold pre-application meetings with prospective graduate students. I understand that this is a pivotal period for you, and I regret not being able to personally engage with each candidate.

Learn More About Our Lab and Science

Since we won't be able to meet individually before you apply, I invite you to:

1. Read Our Publications: Familiarize yourself with our latest research papers to get an in-depth understanding of our current projects and methodologies.

2. Explore Our Lab Website: Here, you will find information about ongoing projects, lab members, and our broader academic objectives. You can also read more about Dr. Reid at www.briemreid.com

3. Follow Us on Social Media: We often share lab updates, recent publications, and relevant scientific discussions that can give you a well-rounded view of our work.

My trainees and I will be in the Center for Cognitive and Brain Health at Northeastern University. I have appointments in Psychology and Health Sciences and can train and mentor students from both departments. My doctoral training was primarily in developmental psychology, with a doctoral minor in epidemiology.

The REID Lab provides a comprehensive and interdisciplinary training experience, designed to equip you with a wide range of skills essential for a successful career in academia or industry. I aim to prepare you for a successful and impactful career in scientific research. Your goals will inform the emphasis of your training.

My aim is to have trainees come away with expertise and experience collecting and analyzing multiple methods, depending on their career goals. Examples include cortisol, immune biomarkers, newborn neurodevelopmental assessments (e.g., NNNS), placental biomarker collection, nutrition biomarkers, nutrition assessment, questionnaire and interview delivery, census tract/geocoding data collection and analysis, and possibly actigraphy for sleep and heart rate in parents and babies. I believe that a well-rounded graduate experience involves both participant-facing data collection and secondary data analysis. There will be plenty of opportunities for publications while the ongoing data is collected for the lab’s primary pregnancy and infancy cohort(s).

Below are some key areas of training you can expect:

Developmental Stress Biology

Our lab specializes in studying the effects of stress during different developmental stages. You will gain firsthand experience in designing, conducting, and analyzing experiments related to developmental stress biology. This will involve designing and running experiments with participants alongside secondary data analysis.

Cortisol and Biological Specimen Collection

Training includes the collection, storage, and analysis of biological specimens like blood and saliva to measure cortisol levels and other biomarkers (e.g., inflammation, nutrient biomarkers, immune biomarkers, etc.). Strict ethical guidelines are followed.

Working with Pregnant and Infant Populations

You will receive training in working sensitively and ethically with vulnerable populations, such as pregnant people and infants, including acquiring informed consent and ensuring participant well-being.

Stress-Nutrient Interactions

Our research often intersects with the field of nutritional sciences, particularly how nutrients can modulate stress responses. You’ll learn to design and interpret studies involving these complex interactions.

Scientific Writing and Communication

You will gain extensive experience in drafting manuscripts, abstracts, and presentations. We regularly hold internal peer-review sessions to enhance your writing, design, and communication skills.

Statistics

A solid foundation in statistics will be provided. Proficiency in statistical software such as R and SPSS is emphasized.

Grant Writing

You will be involved in the process of grant writing, from identifying funding opportunities to drafting proposals, budget planning, and submission.

Career Development

We hold regular career development sessions focusing on project management, goal setting, networking, academic job search, industry transition, and other essential skills for your future.

Additional Training Opportunities with Co-mentors

The lab collaborates with experts in various fields, providing opportunities for specialized training. For instance, if you are interested in neuroimaging, arrangements can be made for additional training with our co-mentors who are experts in this area.

I love mentoring, and I see my mentees as part of my scientific legacy. I view myself as a senior colleague and coach. I treat mentees as junior colleagues, which means you are in charge of your career direction and I am here to support your career goals. To use a sports metaphor, you are the “Olympic athlete” - I can provide training on technique and coach you on your strengths and where to improve, and encourage regular rest and recovery. But, you’re the athlete in the pool/track/game/etc - your goals are ultimately up to you!

Authoritative & Supportive: I have high expectations for my trainees, and that comes along with setting realistic boundaries for research longevity and providing the high level of support necessary to meet them. As a mentee, you'll be encouraged to set ambitious career and academic goals while balancing your personal and professional commitments and values. My job will be to guide you toward the resources you need and advocate for you, ensuring that you're well-supported in your journey.

Collaborative: Our lab uses a team science model, fostering intra and inter-lab collaboration. Co-advising is common and encouraged. The goal is to create research that integrates the expertise and skills of multiple mentors into a cohesive and impactful direction.

Direct & Responsive: I value up-front and direct communication. Whether it's via email or face-to-face, you can expect prompt and thoughtful responses during working hours. Technology (Slack, Asana) is often utilized to facilitate communication and project management.

Scaffolding: Initial hands-on guidance gradually transitions to mentee-led research, equipping you for independence.

Lab Involvement & Co-mentoring: Active participation in lab projects is a must, with mentorship occurring both vertically and horizontally among lab members.

To give you an idea of what we are and will be working on, I recommend looking through:

Our current grants on the NIH Grant Reporter (for example: K99/R00, R01HL149709).

Review: The Interaction between Psychological Stress and Iron Status on Early-Life Neurodevelopmental Outcomes

Dr. Brie Reid’s Google Scholar Profile

• Curiosity — open to being wrong, to ways of knowing beyond our own, and committed to doing our own thinking rather than outsourcing it

• Respect — for participants, each other, and the communities we work with

• Justice — equity and accountability as part of doing good science

• Connection — we rise together, with open communication and trust

• Play — creativity and rest are part of the process, not a break from it

• Integrity — transparency, rigor, and room for everyone to grow

Why Northeastern: The people and the support were the biggest draw. I had offers from Northeastern and another university, and both were dream jobs in terms of people and resources. The decision was hard, but it came down to wanting to be somewhere I could collaborate closely with people who shared my values around rigor and accessibility in research, and who were ready to collaborate from day one.

At Northeastern, that meant Dr. Laurel Gabard-Durnam in the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Health, whose infant neuroimaging work aligned closely with mine, and Emily Zimmerman and Lauren Raine’s work on infant physical development, which spoke directly to my own developmental questions. It also meant Dr. Varun Mishra’s work on wearables and health and Alex Rodman and Josh Curtiss’s work using ecological momentary assessment for mental health, both of which opened up new methods I could bring into my research. On the animal-model side, Heather Brenhouse’s work on maternal separation in rodents gave me a lens to think alongside, and Chuck Hillman’s work on exercise and cognition connected to the physiology side of what I study. I was also excited about the PROTECT cohort based in Puerto Rico as a chance to extend my work into new populations.

The developmental area in the department is strong and growing, and having colleagues across the Institute and in public health and health sciences meant I had people who understood the nutrition and physiology side of my work too.

Why Boston: Boston is also one of the country’s hubs for education and medicine, and we liked living in the Northeast. I was drawn to Northeastern’s applied, interdisciplinary mission too — it reminded me of some of the best parts of my own education at Cornell.

Our developmental area is strong, with kind and brilliant people working in both human and non-human animal models. I can’t overstate how welcoming and supportive the department, and the university more broadly, are. The program also understands that graduate training needs an applied focus, which gives students flexibility to meet requirements while still doing research and publishing.

As for weaknesses: it’s hard for any program to keep pace with cutting-edge statistics, so I always encourage my students to take outside workshops to build those skills. Our students are expected to TA and learning to juggle teaching and research is also part of what it means to be a professor. The department works hard to let students request certain classes to TA and to keep the load manageable. And if you look at where our students are publishing, you’ll see that most are highly productive and making real contributions to the field.

Curiosity is key — foundational to being a good graduate student and academic, full stop. That means curiosity about the science: why did the data prove or disprove your hypothesis, what’s next. But it also means curiosity about yourself and others, and a willingness to be wrong, sometimes publicly. We can’t get it right all the time, and curiosity is what keeps you from calcifying into someone who’s stuck.

Kindness matters too. Life is hard, and it gets easier when we’re kind to ourselves and to others.

And be ready for independence that can feel different from undergrad, post-bacc, or even a master’s program. No one is here to hand you the answers.

My PI in grad school was Megan Gunnar, who already had an amazing reputation for mentoring. What I took away from her was high expectations paired with high support. She pushed me to think deeper and always ask why, why, why. She also opened up opportunities for me and advocated for me internally and externally — it wasn’t until I left that I realized how rare that is.

She was generous with her time, but not in the way many junior people expect. We didn’t have weekly 1:1s unless a deadline required it, because we had two-hour group meetings weekly, check-ins over lunch in the lab, and a generous, supportive research staff. When we did meet one-on-one, it was usually 30 minutes — and we got more done in that half hour than a lot of people get done in an hour, because she expected us to come with an agenda and answers already partly worked through. She also wanted to help us plan not just our research, but the vision we had for ourselves in work and life. Once a semester we had “life meetings” where we talked about where we wanted to go over the next few years. Those were hugely impactful strategy sessions, and I bring them into my own mentorship now.

The clearest way she showed generosity with her time: she returned drafts with feedback within 48 hours, often within 24. She made a commitment not to be the bottleneck for student productivity, and it was clear our careers mattered to her — she’d wake up early to work on our writing. Sometimes that meant drafts came back faster than we wanted. I’ll never forget submitting my dissertation prospectus at 1am and getting feedback by 6am, when I really needed a break!

Megan cared about us as people. She supported me through health challenges and through having my first child in grad school. She believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself. If I’m half the mentor she was, I’ll be thrilled — I work every day to live up to the example she set.

I’ve also been lucky to have other mentors, most notably Michael Georgieff, who has been a sounding board and champion for the kind of interdisciplinary stress and nutrition research I do, and who has been endlessly generous with his time, kindness, and support.

For students considering academia: the minutiae of research and administration grows over time, as does the need to write quickly and effectively while keeping a grant and publishing pipeline going alongside data collection and study design. I don’t love the admin side — budgets, IRB applications, material transfer agreements — but it’s a real part of the job. Science isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s built on continuous learning and critique, and learning to separate your self-worth from your work is hard but essential.

The part I love most is mentoring, and working with teams of brilliant, kind scientists to answer questions no one has asked before. Ninety-eight percent of it is the day-to-day grind (like any job!), but that 2% when you discover something genuinely new about the world is one of the best feelings there is. I love watching my mentees grow their own research areas and expertise. I love a good day of wallowing in data like a pig in mud. I even like grant writing, because it forces me to put the ideas swirling in my head down on paper.

If I could change anything, I’d increase funding and hire someone to manage more of the administrative load — pie-in-the-sky dreams. As it is, I love my job: the creativity, the excitement, the flexibility, and getting to work with the best and brightest every day. Priceless.

(And to be clear — I love my job, and it’s hard. There are hard days and hard seasons. I take time away and compartmentalize my personal and work time intentionally, so I can come back to both as a whole person, not a burned-out husk.)

Learning to think for yourself, and especially to zoom in and zoom out — in your science and in your life. Zooming in means getting the details right: the analysis, the writing, the day-to-day rigor. Zooming out means checking in on the bigger picture: is this the work I actually want to be doing, is this the life I want to be building.

I learned that lesson the hard way. My friend and lab “twin,” Dr. Carrie DePasquale, started grad school in Megan’s lab the same year I did. She mentored me then, and in her absence, she still does. We defended our dissertations, and a few months later she died suddenly of a cardiac event, at 26. That loss forced me to zoom in and out in a way nothing else had: if I don’t get a long life, and none of us are guaranteed one, am I doing the work I want to be doing? Am I showing up, day to day, the way I want to show up?

I try to carry that question into how I mentor students. It’s part of why I push students to stay curious rather than defended — asking the basic question, admitting what you don’t know yet — because that openness is what lets you actually notice when the big picture has shifted. Grad school asks a lot of you, and it’s also the right time to find ways of working, and living, that you can sustain for the long haul.

A scholarship in her name supports first-generation PhD students, like she was. If her story resonates with you, you can donate to the fellowship that carries her legacy forward.