UCLA

 

DR. AARON BLAISDELL

FACULTY ADVISOR

Dr. Aaron Blaisdell is a UCLA Psychology Professor, and a member of the Brain Research Institute, the Integrative Center for Learning & Memory, and the Evolutionary Medicine program. He received a BA in Anthropology (SUNY Stony Brook), an MS in Anthropology (Kent State University), a Ph.D. in Behavioral Neuroscience (SUNY Binghamton), and had 2 years of postdoctoral training (Tufts University). Dr. Blaisdell directs the UCLA Comparative Cognition Lab where he studies comparative cognition, behavioral neuroscience, and evolutionary mismatch. He co-founded the Ancestral Health Society and is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Evolution and Health.

 

CLAUDIA AGUIRRE

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

Claudia Aguirre is a first generation, Latina in her 5th year as a PhD student in the Psychology Behavioral Neuroscience Program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She received her BA in Psychology from the University of Southern California (USC), where she spent 2 years as a an undergraduate, 3 years as a post-bac conducting nicotine and tobacco research in clinical populations at USC Health Sciences Campus under the mentorship of Dr. Adam Leventhal. At UCLA, her research focuses on understanding the neural pathways that are altered or disrupted by chronic alcohol use as this may lead to impairments in decision-making later on, as well as looking a potential sex differences that may be moderating these effects. During her free time, Claudia enjoys the outdoors, especially the mountains, where she can often be found camping, biking, running, or climbing

Wave-Ananda Baskerville

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

My name is Wave-Ananda Baskerville (she/her), but I go by Wave. I am a first-year clinical psychology graduate student working in the UCLA Addictions Laboratory under the mentorship of Dr. Lara Ray. Broadly, I am interested in substance use disorder etiology and potential mediators and moderators of pharmacotherapy treatment response.

Ruby Basyouni

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

Ruby Basyouni (she/her/hers) is a second-year graduate student working with Dr. Carolyn Parkinson in the Computational Social Neuroscience lab. Ruby is interested in examining how person knowledge and motivational relevance influence social perception and affective processing. She is currently studying how knowledge of others’ relationships affects social perceptions and behavior.

Joni Brown

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

My name is Joni Brown (she/her) and I’m a third year PhD student in Health Psychology, working primarily with Professor Chris Dunkel Schetter. My research interest centers race, racial discrimination and physical and mental health in Black/African American women. I’m particularly interested in sociocultural factors that affect the physical health of Black women in adulthood, such as childhood racial and gendered-racial socialization messages. I also have a strong interest in topics of maternal and reproductive health.

Rocio Burgos

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

My name is Rocio Burgos, she/her, first year in developmental and my primary advisor is Dr. Greenfield. My research focuses on the experiences of first-generation college students.

Belinda Chen

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

Belinda Chen (she/her) is a second year graduate student in UCLA”s clinical psychology doctoral program. She is advised by Dr. Anna Lau in the Culture and Race/Ethnicity in Youth Mental Health (CARE) Lab and has research interests focused on increasing access to high quality mental healthcare and improving care continuity for racial/ethnic minority youth. Additionally, Belinda is interested in racial/ethnic disparities in mental health care and community- and system- level factors that drive these disparities.

Danielle Currin

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

Danielle Currin (she/her/hers) is a fourth-year PhD student in Clinical Psychology. She works with Dr. Katherine Karlsgodt in the Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience Lab. Her research seeks to understand the relationships among cognitive ability, development, and the appearance and maintenance of psychosis symptoms.

Peter Fisher

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

My name is Peter Fisher and I am a fourth year PhD student in the social area. I work with Dr. Tiffany Brannon. I am interested in advancing psychological theory to address important social issues such as reducing sexist beliefs, increasing intergroup empathy, and shifting social norms to be more prosocial. My research explores the impact of culture on identities, with a specific focus on privileged social identities such as whites and men.

Jessica Fossum

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

My name is Jessica Fossum (she/her/hers), and I am a third year in the quantitative psychology area working with Dr. Amanda Montoya. I am interested in research methodology, particular statistical power analysis to make sure studies have a proper sample size to find the effects researchers are looking for. I also research the use of open science practices such as registered reports.

Bear Goldstein

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

My name is Bear Goldstein (he/him). I am a first year in the Social area with a focus in Social and Affective Neuroscience, and I primarily work in the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab with Matthew Lieberman. I am interested in the neuroscience of teams. Specifically, I study the level of neural synchrony and asynchrony across multiple brains when people are working together. I hope my research can shed light on the underpinnings of positive team dynamics and the ways in which we may improve team outcomes, including productivity, creativity, and cohesiveness.

Lauren Hofschneider

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

Lauren Hofschneider (she/her/hers) is a 5th year graduate student in Health Psychology. She works with Dr. A Janet Tomiyama, and her work focuses on the relationship between stress and eating behaviors within the context of low social status, food insecurity, and scarcity.

Maira Karan

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

Maira Karan (she/her) is a 5th year doctoral candidate in the developmental area within the department of psychology at UCLA and she works with Dr. Andrew Fuligni in the Adolescent Development Lab. Maira studies adolescent development in the context of positive behaviors such as prosociality and empathy. She examines the development of these behaviors using experimental tasks as well as fMRI methodology to understand how the adolescent brain develops to support these behaviors. Another line of her work focuses on how sleep chronotype affects adolescent health and wellbeing.

Kristen Lee

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

Kristen Lee (she/hers) is a third-year graduate student in UCLA’s Health Psychology program. Her primary advisor is Dr. A. Janet Tomiyama. She graduated from UC Berkeley in 2014 with her B.A. in Psychology. Broadly, Kristen is interested in understanding the relationships between social connection and eating behavior and their shared biological pathways that ultimately influence health outcomes. She is also interested in weight stigma and health behavior change related to eating and weight issues.

Jordan Levinson

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

As an undergraduate at Monmouth University, Jordan (she/her) worked in Dr. Lisa Dinella’s Gender Development Laboratory researching how media and toys influence preschool-aged children’s gender schemas. During the next few years, she served as City Year Corps Member, a special education aide, and a research assistant at Harvard School of Public Health Prevention Research Center. She then spent two years at Boston Children’s Hospital researching adolescent substance use, eating disorders prevention, and sexual orientation and gender identity. Her work now as a doctoral student at UCLA focuses on the developmental effects of media, weight stigma, and disordered eating, under the primary mentorship of Dr. Janet Tomiyama.

Riley Marshall

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

Riley Marshall (they/them) is a second-year social area graduate student in Dr. Tiffany Brannon’s Culture and Contact Lab. They are currently focused on understanding and utilizing the link between institutional diversity messages and medical mistrust in order to combat vaccine hesitancy.

Rachel McKinney

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

Rachel (she/her/hers) is a second-year graduate student in the UCLA Clinical Psychology program working under the mentorship of Dr. Katherine Karlsgodt. Prior to starting at UCLA, she received her B.S. in Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University and spent two years working full-time as a research assistant at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Her current research focuses on studying factors that contribute to variability in symptom expression and outcomes in people with psychotic disorders.

Lindsay Meredith

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

My name is Lindsay Meredith (she/her) and I am a fourth year clinical psychology graduate student. For my undergraduate studies, I attended Miami University of Ohio and then served as a research coordinator in Charleston, SC for three years before starting graduate school at UCLA. Dr. Lara Ray is my research mentor and in her lab, I research addiction and improving treatments for alcohol and other substance use disorders. I also serve as a student therapist in the Psychology Clinic.

Gil Moreu

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

My name is Gil Moreu (he/him) and I’m a first year Ph.D. student in the Social Psychology area. I work with Dr. Yuen Huo on issues related to social identity, intergroup relations, and political psychology. I’m currently working on a project exploring non-prototypical group members’ experiences with intragroup rejection and outgroup discrimination and how these experiences influence identity related behaviors and political attitudes/behaviors.

Dillon Murphy

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

My name is Dillon (he, him, his) and I grew up in Downers Grove, a suburb of Chicago before attending the University of Oregon followed by the University of California, Los Angeles (3rd year, cognitive area, advisor: Alan Castel). In my free time, I like to explore the outdoors, hike, read, write, run, as well as play and coach basketball, tennis, baseball, and football.

Jordan Parker

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

My name is Jordan (she/her) and I’m a second year student in Health Psychology advised by Dr. Janet Tomiyama. Broadly, my research focuses on the intersections between race and health, applying an intersectionality framework to the psychological study of body image and eating behaviors in Black women. For example, I study how experiences of discrimination (e.g., colorism, racism, sexism) affect body image, how they may subsequently influence eating behaviors, and how they longitudinally contribute to disordered eating and related health disparities.

Gwen Price

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

My name is Gwen Price (she/her) and I am a 6th year PhD student in Developmental Psychology. My primary advisor is Dr. Catherine Sandhofer and together we do work on child language development. In general, my work has sought to understand how children’s specific learning experiences affect acquisition and retention of language. Specifically, I have examined how the number of labels, kinds of labels (e.g., positive or negative; specific or general labels), and the timing of labels (e.g., all together or spaced out in time) affects how children learn object and emotion words.

Danny Rahal

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

Danny Rahal (he/his) is a sixth-year student in Developmental Psychology. He works primarily with Dr. Ted Robles to study the consequences of low socioeconomic status and discrimination on health, particularly their effects on individuals’ ability to respond to stress.

Gabrielle Rinne

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

I’m Gabrielle Rinne (she/her/hers) and I’m a third year in the Health Psychology program at UCLA. I primarily work with Dr. Dunkel Schetter who leads the Stress Processes and Pregnancy Lab. My research is primarily focused on how exposure to maternal stress and psychological distress in the prenatal period influences early infant and child mental health, as well as how postnatal factors such as parenting modify the association between prenatal exposures and early infant and child mental health.

Chrissy Sandman

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

Chrissy Sandman (she/her/hers) is a 5th year graduate student in the clinical psychology Ph.D. program working with Dr. Michelle Craske in the Anxiety and Depression Research Center. Drawing from multiple methods (linguistic analysis, neuroimaging, physiology), her research focuses on emotion regulation – both increasing positive emotion and decreasing negative emotion – in the context of psychotherapy, with the aim of enhancing existing treatments and developing novel interventions for depression and anxiety. She is particularly interested in mindfulness and mind-body interventions to improve mental and physical well-being.

Sara Schiff

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

Hello! My name is Sara Schiff (she/her) and I am a second year in the Clinical Psychology doctoral program working with Dr. Steve Lee. I received my B.S. in Psychology from Tufts University in 2018. While there, I worked with Dr. Paul Muentener’s Cognitive Development Lab and researched how young children understand the causes and effects of emotion. After graduating, I worked as a project assistant at the University of Southern California’s Health, Emotion, and Addiction lab examining the intersection of health behavior, mental health, and tobacco use. My current research interests include understanding the etiology of conduct problems, particularly among girls. At present, I am looking at the connection between positive and negative peer relationship factors, as well as pubertal timing, and the emergence of conduct problems in adolescence.

Mary Tucker

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

Mary (she/her) –I am a grad student in the developmental psychology area working with Jim Stigler in the UCLA Teaching and Learning Lab. My research focuses on teaching, learning, and applying research to instructional design. Areas of expertise include STEM education and learning technology design.

Catherine Walsh

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

Hi all, my name is Catherine Walsh (she/her). I am a 4th year graduate student in the Cognitive Neuroscience area. I work with Jesse Rissman to study memory using behavioral methods and fMRI to study individual differences in memory. I’m particularly interested in how networks of brain activity work together to support complex and ecologically valid memory tasks.

Mary Whatley

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

My name is Mary Whatley (she/her), and I am a 4th year graduate student in the Cognitive Psychology PhD program. I work with Alan Castel and am broadly interested in motivational factors that influence cognition as we age. I ask questions like: How does our curiosity about the world change as we get older, and how does it affect what we learn and remember? How do we remember what’s important as we age? What do we know about our own memory abilities in older age?

Julia Yarrington

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

Julia Yarrington (she/her/hers). I am a fourth year doctoral student in the clinical psychology area. My primary mentor is Michelle Craske. My research focuses broadly on understanding risk for and protection from depression, anxiety, and suicide. My recent work has focused on the relevance of positive affect and inflammatory processes to disease progression, and how we can harness protective factors in peoples’ lives (i.e., positive affect) to downregulate harmful processes (i.e., chronic inflammation) in an effort to prevent the development of depression or anxiety. I also have an interest in digital mental health interventions (e.g., app-based interventions).

Icy Zhang

GRADUATE STUDENT MENTOR

Icy Zhang is a second year graduate students in developmental psychology. Her primary advisor is Jim Stigler. She is broadly interested in understanding the processes of teaching and learning, applying principles and theories in cognitive and developmental psychology to real classrooms, exploring the use and impact of embodied cognition in education.