Sydney Hans
Associate Professor in Psychiatry

The University of Chicago Chronicle
June 8, 2000

“I was astounded to find out I had even been nominated for this award. I wasn’t at all sure I qualified, since I do very little classroom teaching with graduate students,” said Sydney Hans, Associate Professor in Psychiatry and a member of the Committee on Human Development and the Committee on Developmental Psychology. Hans is one of four graduate-level teachers who won a 2000 Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching.

“I work with students one-on-one or in small groups, or I hire them as research assistants. I rarely teach them in the classroom, but they get involved in my research, and I get involved in theirs. In the process of sharing our ideas and struggles, I think they learn how to do good research.”

Hans studies the delicate interplay between biology and social interaction, how personal relationships, such as the connections between a mother and her child, can affect the child’s growth and development. A lot of what she has learned along the way, she said, also applies to teaching.

“When we observe parents, we look to see if they are available when the child needs them,” she said.

“Do they empathize, do they provide structure, set limits, make plans? I think some of the same issues apply to teachers and students. I try to be around when students need help. I try to remember how I felt when I was a student and make them feel comfortable coming to me. And I try to give them structure, to help them focus their research plans, limit their very ambitious projects to reasonable goals and figure out how to get there.”

Hans and her students study children at risk, those who grow up in extreme poverty, whose parents are substance abusers or have major mental disorders. They follow these children for years, trying to pick apart the biological and social factors that contribute to risk and resilience.

For example, Hans’ current projects include a 14-year follow-up study of infants exposed before birth to drugs such as heroin or cocaine. She explores how this drug exposure and subsequent rearing experiences interact to affect the development of the child’s brain and bodyÑeverything from attention span to coordination to peer relations.

Another 20-year project involves following infants born to parents with schizophrenia into adulthood to determine how inherited genes may render them more vulnerable to the disorder and whether there are early behavioral abnormalities that can act as warning signs of increased susceptibility.

Although Hans came to the University as a Research Associate in 1978, fresh out of graduate school at Harvard University, she did not get very involved in teaching until about 10 years ago when she began mentoring more and more graduate and undergraduate students, introducing them to the “world of modern research.”

She attracted students who had projects that fell somewhere between the social sciences and biological psychiatry.

Teaching, she said, has had a significant impact on her own research. “Most good new ideas,” she insists, “come from sharing thoughts, bouncing ideas off of one another.” Through work with students in the social sciences, her projects have expanded in scope, taking a broader view of children’s environments. For example, she has studied how family members support one another to raise and protect their children in conditions of extreme poverty and frequent violence.

A recent example of Hans’ work is a study still underway at the Robert Taylor Homes, a vast housing project on Chicago’s South Side. She and her students found that although many children live in single-parent households, “the fathers are much more important than anyone expected,” she said. “The majority are actually very involved.”

But a child’s community reaches far beyond the parents, she discovered, even beyond extended families to include whole “constellations” of families.

Raising, protecting and educating a child in this setting is “a matter of constant, complicated negotiations,” concludes Hans. Teaching, too, can involve such complex negotiations.