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mseltzer@waisman.wisc.edu
Phone: (608) 263-5940
Fax: (608) 263-3300
www.waisman.wisc.edu
About the Director
Marsha Mailick Seltzer, PhD, is the Principal Investigator of the Waisman Center's Core Grant from the NICHD, which currently is in its 46th year of funding. The focus of her research is on the life course impacts of developmental disabilities on the family. She is interested in how lifelong caregiving affects the well-being of parents and siblings of individuals with disabilities, including autism, Down syndrome, schizophrenia, and fragile X syndrome. In addition, she has studied how the family environment affects the development of individuals with disabilities during adolescence and adulthood.
Seltzer's research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health since 1990.
She currently is Principal Investigator of five grants: a 12-year longitudinal study of families of autism during adolescence and adulthood (funded by the NIA), research on a demographically-representative sample of parents of individuals with developmental disabilities (funded by the NIA), a study of quality of life of adults with autism (funded by Autism Speaks), a study of family adaptation to fragile X syndrome (FXS; funded by the NICHD), an epidemiological study of the premutation of FXS (funded by the Centers for Disease Control). She is also collaborating on a 20-year follow up of families of older adults with Down syndrome.
Together, these studies offer specific insights about parenting a child with a disability, revealing both the stresses of this challenge and the resiliency of parents who cope successfully. In addition, her studies more generally address child effects on parents, revealing the bi-directional and reciprocal influences of parents and children on their unfolding and intersecting development across the life course.
- Director of Waisman Center since 2002; Acting Director 2001-2002
- BA, UW-Madison, 1972 Psychology and Sociology
- PhD, Brandeis University, 1978 Social Policy
- Recruited from Boston University, where she was an Associate Professor, Seltzer joined the faculty at the UW-Madison in 1988. She has been a Waisman Center faculty scientist since that time and holds the Vaughan Bascom & Elizabeth M. Boggs Professorships. She served as Interim Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery from August 2006 through October 2008.
- Seltzer is Principal Investigator of the Waisman Center Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Core Grant, awarded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
- Seltzer holds a number of academic affiliations across the campus, including the Institute on Aging, the Center for Demography of Health and Aging, the Population Health MS/PhD Program Faculty, the Institute for Research on Poverty, and the LaFollette School of Public Affairs, as well as appointments in the School of Social Work and Department of Pediatrics. She is Director of the Waisman Center's Postdoctoral Training Program in Developmental Disabilities Research.
- The author of more than 160 publications, Seltzer is the recipient of the Hilldale Award of the UW-Madison, the Research Career Award of the American Association of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, the Distinguished Research Award of The Arc, and the Christian Pueschel Memorial Research Award of the Down Syndrome Congress. She is immediate past chair of the Developmental Disabilities Research Centers Association.
