The neuroscientist decoding how the teenage brain develops
Brenden Tervo-Clemmens explores what daily changes in brain function mean for teens’ lives and education
Interviewee:
Interview by:
When Brenden Tervo-Clemmens was working in special education, he came to realize that research could help us understand why some children struggle and find ways to better support them. Today, he studies the adolescent brain, with the goal of improving young people’s learning, mental health, and development. Aisha Schnellmann finds out more.
Aisha Schnellmann: What questions are you exploring in your research on adolescent brain development?
Brenden Tervo-Clemmens: Adolescence is a sensitive period for learning, social-emotional growth, and building key relationships—and it can also be a time of significant challenges. By understanding how the brain changes during adolescence and how these changes relate to cognition and mental health, I hope to learn more about why some teens struggle more than others. Specifically, I study how an individual teen’s brain function changes from day to day. This helps us understand not only what’s typical for adolescents as a group, but also what’s unique to each teen and how this relates to their daily experiences. My goal is to use this knowledge to help support young people’s learning, mental health, and development.
“Adolescence is a sensitive period for learning, social-emotional growth, and building key relationships—and it can also be a time of significant challenges.”
AS: What drew you to this field?
BTC: Before I was a research scientist, I was a behavioral specialist in a special education program for adolescents. By chance, I became involved in helping a group of researchers from a local university conduct a study about behavioral challenges, class attendance, and learning at our school. That experience made me realize the importance of research in answering questions about why some children struggle and how we can do a better job of supporting them. This inspired me to pursue a career that would allow me to make a contribution by researching adolescent development.
AS: How will your research help adolescents in and out of the classroom?
BTC: We want to understand how to optimize learning during adolescence and shape better educational practices and policies. Adolescence is a key stage of development that is often overlooked, in contrast to early childhood. Tailored cognitive and educational interventions can make a big difference during the teenage years.
“Tailored cognitive and educational interventions can make a big difference during the teenage years.”
By focusing on changes in teens’ day-to-day brain function, our work connects brain imaging directly to real-life experiences – for example, what happens in the classroom. We also move beyond one-size-fits-all approaches by working towards more personalized, dynamic models of adolescent brain function and learning. This is especially important as young people face increasing psychological, educational, and social pressures. Our goal is to create scientific tools to identify individual needs early, and then support timely intervention and build resilience during this important stage of life.
AS: How has your research changed over time?
BTC: Early in my career, I focused mainly on differences between individuals in an effort to understand why some young people struggle with learning or mental health while others do not. However, working directly with adolescents and collaborating with professionals in clinical, educational, and developmental contexts, I came to see how much change also happens within each person from day to day. This led me to research that better reflects the complexity of real life. Lately, I have been dedicating most of my efforts to developing more personalized and precise studies of brain and behavior to understand what makes a teenager unique over time and across different real-world situations.
AS: What ideas are you most excited about pursuing next?
BTC: My students and I are interested in many new research questions! One emerging theme is how sleep and other daily rhythms shape the brain circuits underlying mood, attention, and learning during adolescence. We are particularly interested in how these short-term, physiological changes in brain function accumulate over time and interact with longer-term developmental trajectories across months and years.
Footnotes
Brenden Tervo-Clemmens is an Assistant Professor at the Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain and the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at the University of Minnesota. His lab (T-C Lab) studies the neurodevelopment of adolescent executive function (goal-directed cognition) in normative and clinical populations, with a focus on leveraging advanced functional brain imaging and real-time phenotyping to understand individualized brain-behavior patterns. In support of these goals, the T-C Lab also engages in methodological research to evaluate and improve the reproducibility, and ultimately the clinical and policy utility, of neurodevelopmental studies. Brenden is a 2025-2027 Jacobs Foundation Research Fellow.
Brenden’s website.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Interviewee:
Interview by: