Dr. Jennifer Jenkins is the Atkinson Chair of Early Child Development and Education. Her training is in developmental clinical psychology and she received her PhD from the University of London. Her research focuses on the influence of marital, sibling and parent-child relationships on young children’s social understanding, early cognitive development, and mental health. She studies why some children are more resilient than others when exposed to risky environments and is particularly interested in sibling differences in development. She is the director of a birth-cohort, longitudinal study of 500 families that have been followed up for seven years, funded by Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.