Brock University’s Distinguished Professor designation is a lifetime appointment recognizing outstanding achievement in each recipient’s academic discipline. This series of articles highlights this year’s recipients. Read more about the award and its recipients on The Brock News.

Distinguished Professor of Psychology Teena Willoughby investigates the factors that influence the behaviour and well-being of adolescents, work that has helped countless parents, educators, health professionals and fellow researchers better understand the transition from childhood to adulthood.

“Adolescence is a particularly intriguing developmental age period, marked by significant physical, cognitive and social changes,” she says. “This age period also comes with an increased risk for the onset of mental health problems and health-risk behaviours.”

Over the last three decades, Willoughby has drilled down on an array of issues connected to young people, from risk taking to self injury to technology use.

“I am deeply interested in exploring how developmental changes interact with the emergence of mental health issues and health-risk behaviours during adolescence,” she says. “Understanding this interplay can reveal how these factors might shape an individual’s trajectory into adulthood.”

She uses a wide variety of techniques that sometimes yield surprising results, such as her finding that risk-taking behaviour peaks in early adulthood rather than the teen years, as other researchers previously believed.

As a result, her work is often talked about beyond academia. In addition to some 200 academic publications and research reports for community partners, her findings have been profiled in mainstream publications such as Forbes, The Washington Post and Parent Magazine, as well as newspapers around the world.

Willoughby, who has also served as the Director of Brock’s Lifespan Development Research Institute since 2021, says her overarching goal is to “generate insights that can inform programs designed to promote healthy development and support adolescents in navigating this critical transitional period.”

To that end, Willoughby leverages two key research strategies — longitudinal studies  and community partnerships — to ensure that results are nuanced and that the impact of her findings can be widely accessed.

“I believe that building strong community connections with school boards, youth-serving agencies, youth advisory committees and health organizations such as UNICEF Canada is important to inform research design and the interpretation of findings,” she says.

In Willoughby’s Adolescent Development Lab, she says she and her students study large groups of participants over extended periods of time using “a combination of self-report surveys, open-ended questions, electroencephalography (EEG) and behavioural experiments to gain a more comprehensive understanding.”

This approach means Willoughby can identify subgroups of youth as well as predictors for future behaviour, something her research has shown is crucial when it comes to prevention and intervention. After annual longitudinal data collection for 18 years, she has amassed three large-scale longitudinal datasets:

• 1284 students in grades three to eight followed for seven years for the Brock Healthy Youth Project
• 4412 adolescents followed through all four years of high school for the Youth Lifestyle Choices – Community University Research Alliance Project
• 1132 first-year undergraduates followed for seven years for the Stressed@Brock Project

“Studying adolescent development requires following large samples of adolescents over time, a labour-intensive task that demands sustained effort and partnerships with schools, parents and youth,” she says. “Long-term longitudinal data are more powerful at characterizing adolescent trajectories.”

Since arriving at Brock in 1995, Willoughby has been recognized with Brock’s Award for Distinguished Research and Creative Activity, the Chancellor’s Chair for Research Excellence, the Niagara Region YWCA Woman of Distinction Award in Science and Technology and a Book of the Year Award from Thomson Nelson, among many others.

An especially meaningful honour came in 2011, when she was recognized with Brock’s inaugural Graduate Mentorship Award.

“Receiving the mentorship award was particularly significant,” says Willoughby. “My students play an enormous role in the success of my research program.”