A reoccurring question that has been central to much of Professor Greenberg’s research is, “how does risk or adversity get under the skin?” Put another way, what is it that determines why some children are more aggressive, have poorer mental health, or don’t achieve at school, while others do OK and flourish?

Since his early clinical career working with hearing-impaired children, his opinion has been that the way in which children think, feel and how they regulate the way in which they think and feel is critically important - skills broadly referred to as social and emotional learning (SEL). In his own words, “emotional regulation is where it's at”.

But Mark Greenberg is not one to rely only on opinion. Instead he has spent over three decades exploring the empirical evidence for such a supposition, a journey that has demanded he collaborate and learn from geneticists, psychologists and specialists in brain functioning, hormones and immune functioning. It is this interface between neuroscience and prevention science that he claims keeps his spirit of enquiry restless and hungry.

To the Peninsula Medical School audience he gives a whistle-stop tour of what he has learnt over these last three decades. The road he has taken has involved countless hours spent in school classrooms, tracking the health and development of 1,250 children from birth that were followed from birth are now just entering first grade, developing a universal evidence-based program and taking it to scale, turning a motor-home into a child-friendly mobile neuroscience laboratory dressed up as a space station, and developing a long-term relationship with His Holiness the Dali Lama.

All of the evidence and experience accumulated along the way, says Greenberg, has pointed in the same direction: first, that early development of effective social and emotional skills is critical for healthy development, and second, that in order to understand how and why this skills are so critical, one must understand the neural and physiological foundations of them.

Whilst Greenberg cautions that we still have a long way to go before truly understanding the complexity of the systems, it is clear that the structure and development of the brain and the elegant neural and hormonal networks linking various physiological systems are undoubtedly implemented in the development and expression of social and emotional skills.

Experiments in his mobile neuroscience lab tell us that much (to children, it is known ‘Twiggle the Turtle’s Space Station” - one of the key characters in his PATHS curriculum). He found that at the age of three years, children’s executive functioning - that is their ability to plan their actions and regulate their emotions - was highly predictive of subsequent behavioral outcomes. What’s more, their physiological stress responses partly explained part of this relationship.

Therefore, while not discounting the critical roles of social and other contextual factors - the late Mary Ainsworth, leading figure of infant-attachment research was one of Mark Greenberg’s mentors - the interface between neuroscience and prevention research is illuminating some of the processes that help understand “how adversity gets under the skin”.

So how might practical prevention efforts - in schools, family centers and communities- use these developments to improve outcomes for children? To Greenberg the answer does not lie in personalized medication or physiological intervention. He is a prevention scientist interested in the application of universal prevention and early intervention efforts that may benefit all children.

To Greenberg, the promise of the interface between neuroscience and prevention science lies in better understand why interventions work for some and not others, and using this knowledge to refine and target interventions for effectively. This is the future of prevention science.