Carlos Cardenas-Iniguez, PhD, an Assistant Professor of Clinical Population and Public Health Sciences in the Division of Environmental Health at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, studies how the places people live shape brain development, cognition, and mental health across childhood and adolescence.
Dr. Cardenas-Iniguez (he/him) earned his PhD in Psychology and Integrative Neuroscience at the University of Chicago in 2019, where his dissertation examined how social stratification and environmental exposures jointly shape neurodevelopment. His research uses large longitudinal cohorts, particularly the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development ( ABCD) Study, to trace how structural and social conditions pattern exposure to air pollution, neighborhood context, and other environmental factors, and how these exposures shape developmental outcomes.
Within ABCD, he co-chairs the Linked External Data and Environment and Policy Working Group, developed the Adolescent Neural Urbanome framework for organizing environmental and social data, and has written on the responsible use of race, ethnicity, and social constructs in neuroimaging.
In exposomics, Dr. Cardenas-Iniguez collaborates with Dr. Rima Habre and Dr. Arcot Rajasekar in the NEXUS Geospatial Sciences Hub, bringing experience linking cohort and environmental data to the Hub’s work. He now directs the Complexity, Context, and Impact (CCI) Lab, where this work continues, examining how social and physical environments jointly shape neurodevelopmental and mental health outcomes.
Fun Fact:
Carlos spent many years performing in a mariachi band and in musical theatre, so he’s always up for karaoke, provided you’re okay with him singing in Spanish.