The study comes at a time when the federal government’s expansion of the child tax credit (CTC), which kept millions of families out of poverty, has expired with Congress showing little interest in allowing it to continue. Mariana Chilton, director of the Center for Hunger-Free Communities at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health, and a national expert on child poverty, said scientists having to use brain scans to demonstrate poverty’s deleterious effects on kids is “sad.” Along with Teachers College, Columbia, the schools involved in the study included the University of Wisconsin, Madison; the University of California, Irvine; Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy; New York University; and the University of Maryland.