Layla Esposito, Ph.D.

Layla Esposito, Ph.D., M.A., is a program director in the Child Development and Behavior Branch and the Pediatric Growth and Nutrition Branch at NICHD, where her portfolios include research on social and emotional development in children and adolescents, child and family processes, human-animal interaction, and childhood obesity. Dr. Esposito completed her master’s degree in clinical psychology and her Ph.D. in social psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University. She currently serves on a number of NIH and interagency committees, such as the National Collaborative on Childhood Obesity Research, the Federal Partners in Bullying Prevention, the NIH Obesity Research Task Force, and as project scientist on several cooperative agreements. Prior to her position at NICHD, Dr. Esposito was a science policy fellow with the Society for Research in Child Development and the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences. Her prior research and clinical work focused on peer victimization, aggression, psychosocial functioning and adjustment in children, and child psychopathology.