At Duke, Jane Costello helps to run the Center for Developmental Epidemiology, in conjunction with Adrian Angold MRCPsyc. The Center brings together researchers from different disciplines in order to advance our understanding of the origins, course, and prevention of mental illness across the life course. Jane’s own program of empirical and theoretical work is designed to integrate developmental science and epidemiology, with the goal of improving the understanding, treatment, and prevention of psychiatric disorders in childhood and adolescence. Jane is also associate director of research at Duke’s Center for Child and Family Policy.

        In her work as an epidemiologist she uses data sets available through the Center for Developmental Epidemiology to develop a model of child psychopathology that will help us to integrate findings about the causes of mental illness ("etiologic epidemiology") with a better understanding of risk factors and the options for prevention ("public health epidemiology"). An important aim is to use findings from this work as the basis for developing a set of propositions about how public health can use a primary care/primary prevention model to improve the emotional and behavioral development of children.

       Jane is currently directing the seventeenth annual wave of data collection for the Great Smoky Mountains Study, a longitudinal study of the development of psychiatric and substance abuse disorders and access to mental health care, in a representative sample of 1400 children and adolescents living in the southeastern United States.