Use the “Groups” dropdown to sort mentors by their research area, or search for specific mentors under “Name”. UConn and UConn Health Center’s faculty and students can search the research interests of the entire database of faculty members by using Lincus.
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| Photo | Name | Title | Department | Research Interests |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | Bethlehem Abebe | Graduate Student | UConn Health | |
 | Robert Astur | Faculty | Psychological Sciences | Hippocampal memory, Virtual Reality testing of complex behaviors, Spatial memory and development, Gender differences, Substance Abuse, PTSD |
| Bob Bayo | Graduate Student | Ohio University | Judgement and decision-making | |
 | Jaime Blackmon | Mental Health Worker | Anxiety, trauma, psychometric validation, stress | |
 | Felicia Blodgett-Duran | Graduate Student | Department of Psychological Sciences | Workplace culture, workplace experience, workplace discrimination |
 | Ana Bobrycki | Psychological Sciences | Reading and language development | |
 | Cynthia Boo | Postdoctoral Researcher | NYU | Pragmatic language abilities of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Personal narrative production, Context effects on language production |
 | Franklin Bray | Graduate Student | College of Liberal Arts and Sciences | Embodied Cognition, Event Cognition, Language Comprehension, Representation |
 | Alaina Brenick | Faculty | Psychological Sciences | Discrimination, intergroup relations, social justice, marginalized populations |
 | Jackie Caemmerer | Faculty | Educational Psychology, NEAG | Psychological Assessment Validity Issues, Relations between Social Variables and Academic Achievement and Application of Structural Equation Modeling & Longitudinal Analysis |
 | Rebecca Canale | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Autism spectrum disorder, Developmental mechanisms of attention and learning, Neural mechanisms of statistical learning and language learning |
| Jordan Cervantes | Graduate Student | Academic self-efficacy, self-discrepancy theory, self-determination theory, underrepresented students in higher education | ||
 | McKenzie Chappell | Graduate Student | School Psychology, NEAG | |
 | Shea Charles | Graduate Student | Educational Psychology | Her research focuses on post-secondary career transitions for STEM students with disabilities and supporting learning for student-athletes with disabilities. |
| Hiral Choksi | Graduate Student | I am particularly interested in speech recognition, language processing, and spoken word interpretation, especially when approached through modern deep learning and machine learning techniques. I’m also curious about how generative AI can enhance human-computer interaction in language tasks. In addition, I’m drawn to the use of remote sensing and predictive modeling for data-driven decision-making, especially in interdisciplinary contexts where language and environmental signals intersect. | ||
 | Silvia Clement-Lam | Faculty | Psychological Sciences | Using multimodal behavioral and neuroimaging methods to examine the brain-behavioral basis of literacy development |
 | Abigael Click | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Perceptions of Gender and Sexual Minorities. LGBTQ+ Identity Denial Essentialism and Social Constructionism. Homophobia/Heteronormality. Intersectional Prejudice. Ableism and Disability Justice. |
 | Cristina Colón-Semenza | Faculty | Kinesiology | Motivation, behavior change, social support, apathy, effort-based decision-making, health equity, mental health |
 | Nicole Cruse | Faculty | Sacred Heart University | My research focuses mainly on narrative and storytelling patterns; what those patterns can tell us about how language operates in the brain; and how using those patterns can be used as measurements for speech therapy and improved quality of life for those with neural-based communication disorders, primarily Aphasia and TBI. |
 | Adam David | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Trauma and recovery, Stress-related growth, Self-evaluation, Mindfulness-based interventions, Meaning-making, Habit formation |
 | Luiza de Melo Carvalho | Graduate Student | Department of Psychological Sciences | Psycholinguistics, Second and additional language acquisition, Reading, Early literacy, Bilingualism |
| Sophia Dominguez Perez | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Trauma and resilience ,Mental health disparities | |
| Kallan Doyon | Graduate Student | School of Social Work | Social Work | |
 | Alev Ecevitoglu | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Behaviour, pharmacology, neuroscience, stress, and genetics |
 | Gayle Edelstein | Graduate Student | Pharmacology, treatment for psychiatric disorders, animal models of disorders, animal behavior, neurochemistry, behavioral pharmacology | |
 | Inge-Marie Eigsti | Faculty | Psychological Sciences | How to map complex behavioral constructs, such as social communication deficits, onto mechanistic processes in the brain; Psycholinguistics in autism spectrum disorders (acquisition of language, conversational gestures, discourse and executive processes, prosody); optimal outcomes in ASD; hyperlexia; savant musical skills; functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) |
 | Mariel Emrich | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Stress, coping, and health. Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and recovery Non-pharmacologic pain management interventions. |
 | Adrian Garcia-Sierra | Faculty | Speech, Language, & Hearing Sciences | Brain plasticity, language development, event related potentials, speech perception, and bilingualism. |
 | Camille Garnsey | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Resilience and coping in the aftermath of trauma, integrative treatments including mindfulness and meditation |
 | Meara Geraty | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Cognitive science of religion, Religion and wellbeing, Meaning in life, Spiritual but not religious identities, Atheism and agnosticism. |
 | Aida Ghiaei | Graduate Student | Engineering | |
 | Frank Griggs | Faculty | College of Liberal Arts and Sciences | |
| Chanyuan Gu | Post Doctoral | I have a background in psychology and neuroscience, with research interests in the neural correlates of naturalistic reading, language comprehension, and audiovisual learning. In addition to examining group-level patterns, I focus on exploring multifaceted individual differences. To uncover the neural mechanisms underlying reading and language comprehension, I employ a combination of behavioral measures, eye-tracking, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and large language models. I also apply both traditional and naturalistic neuroimaging approaches to address my research questions. | ||
 | Danielle Guttman-Lapin | Faculty | Uconn School of Medicine | |
 | Gabrielle Hettie | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Chronic pain, biopsychosocial factors, emotion regulation, health psychology |
 | Amanda Hiner | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Occupational Health & Well-Being, Sexual Harassment, Workplace Discrimination |
| Mikerobert Joseph | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | ||
 | Arielle Keller | Faculty | Psychological Sciences | Dr. Keller’s research program aims to understand attention as a core element of human cognition by bridging ideas and perspectives across cognitive, clinical, computational, and developmental neuroscience. |
 | Steve Kinsey | Faculty | School of Nursing | Anxiety/Depression, Cannabinoid/opioid pharmacology, Chronic pain, Stress and Substance use disorders |
 | Justin Laplante | Faculty | Psychological Sciences | Meditation, interpersonal relationships, religious culture |
 | Martin Lee | Graduate Student | Teachers College, Columbia University | Clinical Psychology, Pediatric Psychology |
 | Wesley Leong | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Event cognition and Conceptual Processing in Language |
 | Lauren Lewis | Postdoc | Texas Tech | Lauren is currently researching under Dr. Thomas Kimball and Dr. Antover Tuliao on the experience of students in Collegiate Recovery Communities. She is interested in lapse and relapse prevention, harm reduction models, and college student recovery. |
 | Ali Lotfi | Graduate Student | Chemistry | Chemistry, Analytical Chemistry, Drug Discovery, Cancer Drug Delivery, Microbiome Metabolomic |
 | Zachary Magin | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Resilience and psychosocial protective factors, Physiological pathways of stress effects on health |
 | Avinash Mahajan | Graduate Student | UConn Health | |
 | Etan Markus | Faculty | Psychological Sciences | Brain basis of behavior, focusing on rats. Specifically: Memory formation; Aging; Hippocampal system; Navigation; Social Interactions |
 | Hillary Marquis | Faculty | UConn Health | Audiology, cochlear implants |
 | Jonas Miller | Faculty | Psychological Sciences | Empathy and prosocial development, Adversity, Resilience, Developmental psychopathology, Developmental social neuroscience, Environmental health |
 | Amanda Montanari | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Health psychology; weight management; health behavior change |
 | Jaime Morales | Graduate Student | Sport-based youth development, Latinidad and sports, Testimonio methodology, Latino Critical Theory | |
 | Jamie Morales | Graduate Student | Educational Leadership, NEAG | His research interests are in Latinidades and sports with a particular interest in bicultural Latina/e/o/x sporting identities and critically examining sports-based youth development initiatives within Latina/e/o/x communities. |
| Erica Morgan | Graduate Student | UConn School of Social Work | I’m particularly interested in sociology, political psychology/science, and other elements of macro social work/social science. I am concentrating on policy practice, within the MSW program. | |
 | Emily Myers | Faculty | Speech, Language, & Hearing Sciences | Cognitive neuroscience of speech and language, aphasia, speech perception. |
 | Hannah O'Connor | Graduate Student | College of Liberal Arts and Sciences | Autism spectrum disorder, linguistics, social communication, gesture |
 | Kayla O'Connor | Graduate Student | Behavior change, social determinants of health, behavioral weight management, resilience in health behavior, stress management for health behavior, young adult health habits, culture and health | |
 | Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch | Faculty | Communication | |
 | Erika Osherow | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Stress and resilience, behavior change, holistic health and performance, trauma-informed mindfulness interventions. |
 | Alexandra Paxton | Faculty | Psychological Sciences | Communication and social interaction as a complex dynamical system (including movement, language, attention, and emotion), Data-rich and dynamics-focused research methods and analyses, Naturally occurring datasets and “big data” for psychological theory-building, Ethics of human-derived data |
 | Kenneth Perez | Faculty | Psychological Sciences | Affective Science; The emotion of awe; Phenomenology; Experiential elicitation on psychological well-being |
 | Amy Pollock | Graduate Student | Engineering | Sustainability, Plastics, Chemistry, Materials processing |
 | Felicia Pratto | Faculty | Psychological Sciences | Intergroup Relations, Dynamics of Power, Social Cognition |
 | Yanina Prystauka | Postdoc | University of Bergen, Norway | Her work explores the cognitive and neural underpinnings of sentence processing with a special focus on how (heritage language) bilingualism affects the construction of sentence-level meaning representation. |
 | Madeline Quam | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Language acquisition and emergence, homesign, sign languages, number cognition |
 | Nairan Ramirez-Esparza | Faculty | Psychological Sciences | How culture and language influences personality, behavior, and health. |
| Juergen Riedelsheimer | Graduate Student | Experimental Psychology | Intersection of music, cognition, and neuroscience | |
 | Aleksandra Rusowicz | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Stigma and health outcomes, social determinants of mental health, political psychology, prejudice |
 | Naomi Sellers | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | how prediction and language error processing offer ways to study the intersection between language production and comprehension, how these processes vary across individuals, and how they might be a way to bridge our understand of normative and impaired language processing. |
| Karen Shalev | Graduate Student | Department of Communication | I am a first-year PhD student studying health communication with particular interest in patient-provider-caregiver communication, chronic illness, and women's health issues. The work is interdisciplinary and requires frequent applications from psychology and other areas. | |
 | William Snyder | Faculty | Linguistics | Language Acquisition, Comparative Syntax, Syntax-Semantics Interface |
 | Lauren Strainge | Faculty | Heath School of Medicine | Neuropsychology, health psychology, geriatrics |
 | Umay Suanda | Faculty | Psychological Sciences | Early communication and language development, the input and the learning environment, the dynamics of early social interactions, statistical learning, mechanisms of word learning. |
 | Breeya Tailor-Sagan | Graduate Student | UConn Health | |
 | Julie Van Dyke | Faculty | Haskins Laboratories | Dr. Van Dyke investigates the interaction of phonological, memory, and executive function abilities on reading and language comprehension across the life-span, with a special focus on language-based clinical disorders. She utilizes eye-tracking methods to investigate natural reading behaviors and the speed-accuracy tradeoff technique to precisely characterize the dynamics of word retrieval and linguistic processing. She also conducts experiments using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and electroencephalography (EEG/ERP) to determine the neurobiological basis of skilled and disabled reading. A driving hypothesis in her research relates to the pervasive reliance on memory retrieval during language processing and the role of similarity-based interference as the primary limitation on successful comprehension. |
 | Paola Vera-Licona | Faculty | Center for Quantitative Medicine, UConn Health | Our research group works on a variety of problems within the fields of computational systems medicine, computational systems biology, mathematical biology and bioinformatics. We focus on the design and application of mathematical algorithms for the modeling, simulation and control of biological networks such as gene regulatory networks, intracellular signaling networks and functional brain networks. |
| Giuliana Vinces | Graduate Student | |||
 | Jillian Watt | Graduate Student | ||
 | Audrey Weber | Graduate Student | Physiology and Neurobiology | |
 | Torri Woodruff | Faculty | Speech, Language, & Hearing Sciences | She has conducted research implementing both qualitative and quantitative methods to look at drivers behind access to early intervention for children who are D/deaf and Hard of hearing. She is passionate about language access across all modalities. |
 | Mariah Xu | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Intergenerational transmission of trauma and psychopathology; interpersonal and family violence; aggression perpetration; systemic inequity and mental health disparities |
 | Colton Yee | Graduate Student | ||
 | Eiling Yee | Faculty | Psychological Sciences | Semantic memory and the neural representation of concepts. Spoken word recognition and language processing. The neural basis of language. |
 | Holly Zaharchuk | Postdoc | Speech, Language, & Hearing Sciences | Currently she is using neural and behavioral methods to study how right and left temporal brain regions contribute to speech perception, with the goal of understanding how therapeutic interventions might recruit these areas in the successful remediation of stroke. Overall, she is interested in learning how the perceptual system adapts to variation and change. |
 | Holly Zaharchuk | Postdoc | Psycholinguistics, linguistic variation (dialect/accent), bilingualism | |
 | Kristyn Zajac | Faculty | Medicine, UConn Health | Dr. Zajac’s research focuses on the development and evaluation of interventions for substance abuse and mental health disorders among high-risk adolescents and young adults. She currently has a career development award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to study treatments for co-occurring substance abuse and posttraumatic stress disorder among young adults |
 | Xinming Zhou | Graduate Student | UT Austin | Her research interests lie in the cognitive and neural processes of speech perception, particularly accented speech and speech-in-noise perception among typical and atypical populations. |
 | Amy Zipf | Nursing Professional Development Specialist | UConn Health |