Dr. Linda Mayes is the Arnold Gesell Professor of Child Psychiatry, Pediatrics, and Psychology in the Yale Child Study Center at the Yale School of Medicine. After graduating in 1973, she received her medical degree at Vanderbilt University. Following an internship and residency in pediatrics, she spent two years as a fellow with Dr. Mildred Stahlman at Vanderbilt in the division of neonatology and worked in the area of developmental outcome of high-risk preterm infants. Dr. Mayes’s interest in the long-term impact of perinatal biological and psychosocial stressors developed during that fellowship and she came to Yale to do a Robert Wood Johnson General Academic Pediatrics fellowship. In her Yale fellowship, where she collaborated with the department of psychology and Dr. William Kessen and with investigators in the Child Study Center including Dr. Donald Cohen. She established a laboratory for studying infant learning and attention. Subsequently, she also developed a neurophysiology laboratory for studies of the startle response and related indices of emotional regulation in children and adolescents and currently oversees the Developmental Electrophysiology Laboratory that includes dense array electroencephalography as a method for studying brain activity in real time.