Federal Grant Award Summary

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) awarded the University of California, Los Angeles a $196,992 K23 Career Development Grant effective May 4, 2026, through April 30, 2031, under the Mental Health Research Grants program (CFDA 93.242). This award supports Dr. Kunmi Sobowale's research and professional development plan focused on advancing mobile device technologies for screening, risk stratification, and personalized prevention and treatment of perinatal and infant mental health conditions. The grant enables Dr. Sobowale to develop competencies in longitudinal study design, intensive longitudinal data analysis, signal processing and speech acoustic analysis, and research methods for assessing parent-child interaction and emotion regulation in early childhood.

The primary research deliverable is a longitudinal study of mother-infant dyads utilizing mobile sensing devices (audio recorders and Bluetooth sensors) to conduct daylong naturalistic assessment of mother-child interaction quality. The study will examine mother-infant conversational turns—a key interaction indicator negatively affected by postpartum depression—and investigate how conversational quality affects child emotion regulation and co-regulation outcomes. Dr. Sobowale will receive didactic and mentorship support from UCLA faculty experts in depression neurobehavioral phenotyping, longitudinal study design, mobile health research, and child socioemotional development, ensuring the training plan directly supports the applied research objectives.