Daniel A. Hackman is interested in how social and environmental contexts influence developmental trajectories of health and well-being across the lifecourse. He investigates how socioeconomic, family, and neighborhood factors, particularly those in early childhood, become associated with the cognitive, affective, and biological systems that influence healthy development. His focus has been on executive function and stress reactivity, at the behavioral, physiological, neurobiological level. He is also interested in the social experiences and mechanisms that can promote health and attenuate risk processes, as Dr. Hackman aims to leverage this work to identify more effective policy and programmatic approaches to prevent and reduce socioeconomic disparities.

Dr. Hackman uses a multi-method, interdisciplinary approach, often longitudinal in nature, integrating tools from population health, psychology, neuroscience, and social work. Recently, he has also developed a virtual reality-based experimental model of neighborhood disadvantage and affluence that can be employed to study neighborhood effects on development.

Prior to his appointment at USC, Dr. Hackman was a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He completed his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and a predoctoral clinical internship and postdoctoral fellowship at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinics, part of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.