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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | Sarah Ahmadi | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Stress and coping, risk and resilience factors, mind-body interventions |
 | Robert Astur | Faculty | Psychological Sciences | Hippocampal memory, Virtual Reality testing of complex behaviors, Spatial memory and development, Gender differences, Substance Abuse, PTSD |
 | Marianne Barton | Faculty | Psychological Sciences | Early parent-child relationships, Early Detection of Autism Spectrum Disorders, Developmental trajectories in Autism |
 | 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 |
 | Cynthia Boo | Postdoctoral Researcher | NYU | Pragmatic language abilities of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Personal narrative production, Context effects on language production |
 | Lindsay Butler | Faculty | Speech, Language, & Hearing Sciences | Dr. Butler’s research interests include cognitive neuroscience of language, brain imaging with functional near-infrared spectroscopy and communication in minimally verbal autistic youth. |
 | 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 |
 | Skyler Carter | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Experiences of first generation college students, Multiple Identities, Multiracial Identity, Cultural fit, Underrepresented groups |
 | 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. |
 | 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. |
 | Shawn Cummings | Graduate Student | Speech, Language, & Hearing Sciences | Speech perception and adaptation, perceptual learning, lack of invariance. |
 | Mostafa Dastgheib | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Diversity, Equity & Inclusion; Occupational Health Psychology; Workplace Mistreatment; Employee Abuse; Exploitation at Work; Abusive Work Environment |
 | 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 |
 | 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. |
 | Carrie Epstein | Graduate Student | Department of Physiology and Neurobiology | Spatial and facial recognition are of particular interest to me but my current research is going to be involved with Alzheimer's and largely neuroscience based as part of an organization. I am part of a lab now at the health center doing work with cartilage repair and orthopedics, while continuing work from my undergrad in Storrs in organic chemistry with my previous PI. |
 | Brighid Fitzpatrick | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Her research interests pertain to the interacting effects of biopsychosocial mechanisms that influence the development and maintenance of eating disorders. She aims to inform culturally competent treatments for those at increased risk for developing pathological eating problems. |
 | Claudia Gaebler | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Parent-child relationships, Intergenerational transmission of trauma and psychopathology, Perinatal psychopathology. |
 | 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 |
 | Alexandra Garr-Schultz | Faculty | Psychological Sciences | Identity, Self-definition, Experiences of Marginalization, Underrepresented groups, Multiple Identities, Authenticity Diversity and Inclusion, Equity in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM), and Experimental, Qualitative and Longitudinal approaches |
| Skye Gasataya | Graduate Student | School of Social Work | Social Work, Cognitive Development, Systematic forms of Racism and Oppression, Cultural Psychology | |
 | Meara Geraty | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Cognitive science of religion, Religion and wellbeing, Meaning in life, Spiritual but not religious identities, Atheism and agnosticism. |
 | Katherine Gnall | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Mind-body interventions, Chronic Pain, Impact of stress on health and health behaviors. |
 | Elizabeth Goldsborough | Graduate Student | School of Social Work | Interprofessional Collaboration. Tobacco and Substance Use Treatment. Palliative Care. Social Work Education and Practice. |
| 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. | ||
 | 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 | ||
 | Darlis Juvino | Graduate Student | Human Development and Family Sciences | Multicultural/Mixed-race identity development. Cultural and social identity development. Ethnic-racial socialization. Parental ethnotheories about youth development. Impacts of cultural diversity on social identity. |
 | Sobhan Katebifar | Graduate Student | Biomedical Engineering | Sobhan Katebifar |
 | 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 |
 | Nathan Lautz | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Cognitive neuroscience of concepts, grounded cognition, semantic control, context effects in semantic memory |
 | Martin Lee | Graduate Student | Teachers College, Columbia University | Clinical Psychology, Pediatric Psychology |
 | Kaya LeGrand | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Language in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) across the lifespan, language learning, and communication abilities of minimally verbal and nonverbal individuals with ASD. |
 | 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. |
 | Lucie Lopez | Graduate Student | School Psychology, NEAG | Lucie's research interests includes how to best support students in school settings and learn how to create optimal learning environments for all students. |
 | Jessica Loya | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Language acquisition in children, Heritage speakers |
 | Zachary Magin | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Resilience and psychosocial protective factors, Physiological pathways of stress effects on health |
 | Jim Magnuson | Faculty | Psychological Sciences | Neurobiology and psychology of language, including processing, development, and disorders of spoken and written language; computational models as theory-building tools; developing comprehensive understanding of language and learning over the lifespan from cognitive, neural, and genetic perspectives through interdisciplinary collaborations; science communication. |
 | Kelly Mahaffy | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Reading comprehension, development of language and reading, and brain structure and function underlying language abilities. |
 | Etan Markus | Faculty | Psychological Sciences | Brain basis of behavior, focusing on rats. Specifically: Memory formation; Aging; Hippocampal system; Navigation; Social Interactions |
 | Katherine McManus-Shipp | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Eating disorders, weight management, physical activity, and obesity; Body image, weight stigma, and excessive exercise; Health psychology; Primary and secondary prevention & intervention |
 | Jonas Miller | Faculty | Psychological Sciences | Empathy and prosocial development, Adversity, Resilience, Developmental psychopathology, Developmental social neuroscience, Environmental health |
 | 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. |
 | Jennifer Mozeiko | Faculty | Speech, Language, & Hearing Sciences | Aphasia rehabilitation, discourse deficits following brain injury, mechanisms for recovery in chronic aphasia, functional neuroimaging. |
 | Emily Myers | Faculty | Speech, Language, & Hearing Sciences | Cognitive neuroscience of speech and language, aphasia, speech perception. |
 | 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 | |
 | 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 |
 | Felicia Pratto | Faculty | Psychological Sciences | Intergroup Relations, Dynamics of Power, Social Cognition |
 | Kathryn Prescott | Postdoc | Psychological Sciences | Dr. Kathryn Prescott’s research investigates how individual child characteristics and cognitive mechanisms interact with specific features of the learning environment giving rise to structural language development in autistic children. |
 | Kathryn Prescott | Post Doctoral | Developmental language disorders, autism, language acquisition, word learning, language processing in young children, language intervention | |
 | 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. |
 | Carla Rash | Faculty | Heath School of Medicine | eHealth/mobile treatment options, health disparities, addiction treatment, responsible gaming |
 | Kirsten Reyna | Graduate Student | Educational Psychology | My research interests include examining predictors of children's school readiness skills, evaluating existing psychometric methods and scales, large-scale data analysis, and data modeling. |
| Juergen Riedelsheimer | Graduate Student | Experimental Psychology | Intersection of music, cognition, and neuroscience | |
 | Lucia Rivas | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Dynamics of communication and the role it plays in inter-organism dependencies. |
 | Heather Robinson | Graduate Student | Psychological Sciences | Cognitive neuroscience, executive function, interactions between attention and emotion, mood disorders, internalizing symptoms. |
 | 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. | |
 | Rhiannon Smith | Faculty | Psychological Sciences | Friendships and social-emotional adjustment in childhood and adolescence |
 | William Snyder | Faculty | Linguistics | Language Acquisition, Comparative Syntax, Syntax-Semantics Interface |
 | Jinwei Song | Graduate Student | UConn Health | My research interest is early intervention for young children with autism spectrum disorder. |
 | Timothy Spellman | Faculty | Neuroscience, UConn Health | Our lab focuses on the physiological substrates of executive functioning within higher-order association areas of the brain. We use a range of tools, including optogenetics, chemogenetics, extra-cellular electrophysiology, 2-photon and light field imaging, calcium and voltage indicators, pharmacology, custom robotics, and advanced statistics to investigate how the coordinated activity of biological neural networks processes information. |
 | 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. |
 | Rachel Tambling | Faculty | Human Development and Family Sciences | Dr. Tambling’s research is centered on intervention and service utilization in behavioral health. She is specifically interested in treatment initiation, client engagement, and client processes of change during psychotherapy. |
 | 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. |
 | Kangli Wang | Graduate Student | Sociology | Sociology of Education, Inequality, and Family |
 | 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 |
 | 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. |
 | 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. |