She spent four years volunteering as a teen crisis counsellor, and intended to pursue a career in social work.
[3] Somerville was eventually a doctoral student at Dartmouth College, where she studied the neural mechanisms of anxiety, negativity and threat.
[4][5] After earning her doctoral degree, Somerville joined the Sackler Institute for Developmental Biology.
[6] In 2012, Somerville joined the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, where she leads the Affective Neuroscience & Development Laboratory in the Center for Brain Science.
[8][9] She believes that dynamic trajectories of brain development shape the interplay between these processes.