Dr. Skowron is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and runs the Family Biobehavioral Health Lab. She is a certified PCIT therapist and Level I Within-Agency Trainer.  Dr. Skowron earned her Ph.D. at the State University of New York, Albany, and completed a pre-doctoral internship at the Palo Alto VA Medical Center. Following her post-doctoral fellowship in child clinical psychology at the University of California, San Francisco's Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute, she worked in the Irving B. Harris-funded Child Trauma Project at San Francisco General Hospital with Dr. Alicia Lieberman, evaluating attachment-based child-parent psychotherapy for mothers and preschool children from violent families. Dr. Skowron served as a former Fulbright Scholar to Ireland (2009-2010); as chair and member of various NIH scientific review panels; and as President of the University Senate in 2019-20. Dr. Skowron and her students study the effectiveness of child and family interventions, including Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) and a newly developed trauma-informed adaptation to PCIT, for supporting caregivers and strengthening biological and behavioral markers of emotion regulation and self-control in caregivers and children.

Dr. Skowron will not be accepting new graduate students for Fall 2025.

Dr. Skowron's research focuses on clarifying the individual and joint contributions of neurobiology and environment to the development of self-regulation and school readiness in young children. Her research also focuses on understanding the neurobiology of positive, responsive parenting and mechanisms of action in effective family interventions. Her core interests lie in discovering the neurobiological bases of behavioral change in family interventions, and translating findings into behavioral interventions that support healthy child development and family preservation. In the Family Biobehavioral Health Lab, Dr. Skowron and her research team use neural, physiological, behavioral, and micro-analytic coding approaches to model data streams in individual and dyadic parent-child processes associated with healthy development, and intervention outcomes. Her lab has completed a clinical trial of Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) to investigate the behavioral, neural, and physiological mechanisms of action in PCIT that support positive changes in parenting, improve parent and child self-regulation and social perceptions, and reduce child abuse and neglect in child welfare-involved families. New research is investigating the effectiveness of a trauma-informed adaptation to PCIT for children and their parents.