Benjamin L. Hankin

Dr. Benjamin Hankin is the Fred and Ruby Kanfer Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. Dr. Hankin completed his undergraduate at Northwestern University and his PhD in Clinical Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research takes a developmental psychopathological approach to understand risk factors and mechanisms in depression and related internalizing emotional disorders, especially in children and adolescents. He is also interested in translating knowledge on vulnerability into evidence-based assessment and interventions. He is interested in studying the interplay and integration of various vulnerabilities to internalizing problems across multiple levels of analysis in youth, including: cognitive, interpersonal, temperament, stress, genetics, stress biology, cognitive control and executive function, attention, parenting, emotion, and neural circuitry. He typically studies these questions with intensive, prospective multi-wave designs that follow relatively large, unselected samples of youth and a caregiver from the general community over several years and across developmentally sensitive transitions.