Dr. Jamilah Silver Receives Victoria S. Levin Award for Early Career Success in Young Children’s Mental Health
We are pleased to announce that Dr. Jamilah Silver (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is the recipient of the 2025 Victoria S. Levin Award.
Dr. Jamilah Silver Receives Victoria S. Levin Award for Early Career Success in Young Children’s Mental Health
Dr. Jamilah Silver is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she directs the Developmental Research in Irritability and Psychopathology (DRIP) Lab. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Education and Social Policy from Northwestern University and her Doctor of Philosophy in Clinical Psychology from Stony Brook University. Her selected mentor for the Victoria S. Levin Award is Dr. Stephanie Parade, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University and Director of Early Childhood Research at E. P. Bradley Hospital.
Dr. Silver’s research program focuses on understanding irritability and related mood disturbances as early emerging, developmentally consequential processes that shape trajectories of mental health from early childhood onward. Her work has helped establish irritability as a distinct transdiagnostic construct and has advanced conceptual clarity by distinguishing tonic irritability, characterized by persistently irritable mood, from phasic irritability, characterized by episodic temper outbursts. She has led research integrating longitudinal and multi-method approaches to clarify the developmental course, heterogeneity, and mechanisms of pediatric irritability.
During the Levin Award period, Dr. Silver will examine the early developmental course of irritability in a longitudinal cohort of children followed from early childhood through adolescence. Focusing on children exposed to adversity as well as comparison peers, this work will identify early childhood risk and protective factors that shape whether irritability persists or attenuates over time. She will also evaluate how multi-method indicators, including observational measures of emotion regulation and behavioral reactivity, enhance early identification of children at risk for later internalizing and externalizing psychopathology. Findings from this work will lay the foundation for a National Institutes of Health R01 application aimed at testing mechanistic pathways and identifying sensitive developmental windows for early intervention.
About the Victoria S. Levin Award
The Victoria S. Levin Award for Early Career Success in Young Children’s Mental Health Research was established to honor and carry forward the focus of Victoria S. Levin’s life's work in scientific research addressing young children’s mental health. Honoring Vicki’s 30 years of distinguished service at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the award’s aim is to heighten the chances of early success in achieving NIH funding for developmentally-informed research that addresses the early foundations of children’s mental health and well-being. The Victoria S. Levin Award is made possible by the donations of hundreds of Vicki’s friends, colleagues, and family members.