CNS 2025: Q&A with Adriana Galván
As a parent of a teen, it can be crushingly difficult to sort through the social drama while attempting to provide guidance that you hope will keep your teen safe. Cognitive neuroscientists are finding, however, that the adolescent brain has its own mechanisms of guiding teens through strategic risk-taking that can be rewarding and beneficial. At no other time in life, for example, are we as willing to seek out new adventures like leaving home to attend college or standing up for causes we believe in.
That’s a key message Adriana Galván, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, hopes to get through in her keynote lecture at the upcoming annual CNS meeting in Boston. “Adolescents are strategic risk-takers,” she says. “More than one might imagine, healthy risk-taking is a necessary part of adolescence that paves the way for exploration, learning, and maturation.”
I spoke with Galván to learn more about how she got started studying the teen brain, how the field has evolved, and what’s next.
CNS: How did you first become interested in adolescent brain development?
Galván: When I started graduate school there were very few studies about the adolescent brain and I was lucky to have a mentor who was as interested in understanding the neurobiology of adolescence as I was. I was interested in better understanding the adolescent brain because I noticed negative stereotypes about the time in life I remembered so fondly. Around the same time there was an explosion of brain imaging tools that helped uncover how the adolescent brain functions. So cognitive neuroscience was an answer to the psychological question.
CNS: We last spoke when you received the Young Investigator Award in 2016. What has changed most about your and/or other researchers’ understanding of the developing adolescent brain since that time?
Galván: Since 2016 there has been a significant uptick in our understanding of how brain connectivity changes throughout adolescence and the critical role that experience and the learning environment has on shaping the final stretch of development that characterizes adolescent brain development.
CNS: Can you share some of the insights you will be discussing in your upcoming keynote address at CNS 2025 in Boston?
Galván: I’m excited to share two things: how research from labs across the world have helped us understand the crucial role that social relationships have on adolescent brain development and how adolescent neuroscience has informed policy relevant for young people. I will also share how the UCLA Center for the Developing Adolescent, which I co-direct with my colleague Andrew Fuligni, works to advance, and make accessible, the science of adolescence to policymakers, legal scholars, and non-academics.
CNS: What do you find members of the public—including parents of teens!—most commonly do not understand about adolescents?
Galván: I hope that the public can gain a more positive perspective about adolescents. This period of life helps propel us into adulthood and the willingness to explore the world is a key attribute of adolescence that helps us learn through trial and error.
CNS: What do you hope people will take away from your keynote address?
Galván: Adolescents are to be celebrated! This period of life deserves society’s investment — in terms of resources, time, and attention–as much as other periods of life.
CNS: What’s next for your research?
Galván: How we as a society can better support the transition into adulthood. For example, this includes taking a deep dive into how we prepare adolescents with the financial literacy necessary to navigate a complex world. And we need to provide young people the social skills, intuition, and curiosity to ask questions. In other words, we need to answer the question: Are we providing the right framework for adolescents to lean into the uncertainty that comes with adulthood?
-Lisa M.P. Munoz
