MY RESEARCH
My deep-rooted interest in affective development has been honed throughout my wide range of research experiences beginning in college, as well as my personal experiences in helping my autistic brother understand complex social cues, and through implementing behavioral therapy for children with autism. My diverse research background spans various research topics, methodologies, and species models (rodents and humans). The culmination of these experiences has equipped me with a comprehensive set of skills and perspectives to study emotional development in both typically developing and clinical populations. Now as I approach the dissertation years of my program and prepare for postdoctoral research, I aim to expand on my robust conceptual map of human emotion expression, emotion recognition, and parent scaffolding, and integrate new skills in pediatric neuroimaging, longitudinal data analysis, and socioemotional development in autism. I am actively working to achieve these goals and am conducting independent research on typical and atypical socioemotional development under the mentorship of Drs. Shulamite Green and Jennifer Silvers, as well as Drs. Catherine Sandhofer and Lucina Uddin.

Prior to graduate school, I surveyed a variety of research topics ranging from basic science on hormones' role in stress and anxiety disorders, dyadic emotion regulation strategies, memory and cognition across the lifespan, and clinical trials for the treatment of anxiety and social withdrawal in autism. Each internship allowed me to test my interests while gaining a foundation of skills in developing a research study, collecting behavioral and neuroimaging data (electroencephalography and cell-staining in rodent brain tissue), fundamental skills in data analysis, reviewing and editing research manuscripts, and poster presentations. Based on my longstanding interest in autism spectrum disorders, I also completed an independent thesis investigating the potential for international early identification and screening tools for children with autism and went on to work as a lab manager for two large autism research networks. During my PhD, I have been weaving the skills I acquired from these experiences towards conducting affective neuroscience and behavioral research in both autism and typically developing youth.

The first three years of my graduate program have been dedicated to understanding emotional expression, processing, and scaffolding. This includes my Masters project, which examines the impact of stress during the COVID-19 pandemic on maternal emotion expression and sensitive caregiving, and collaborating on a project with my colleague, Dr. Emily Neer, that investigates perspective-taking abilities in toddlers through a video chat format. These independent projects have resulted in a pre-registration with Open Science Framework, a poster presentation at the International Congress of Infant Studies, and recently finalized dataset which will be written up for publication shortly. The pandemic posed several challenges throughout my postbaccalaureate and graduate career largely due to shutdowns and restrictions in collecting in-lab data on child participants. In lieu of in-person data collection, I leveraged the use of secondary datasets and online studies via Zoom. Despite disruptions due to the COVID shutdowns, I was able to take advantage of these opportunities and develop a foundation in behavioral research in emotion expressivity and socioemotional cognition within typical development. The latter half of my doctoral program has been focused on connecting behavioral methodologies with neuroimaging training to attain my training goals.

My current research will contribute to defining the impact of complex social cues on emotion processing during the critical preschool period. In addition, this project will identify the longitudinal development of some of the key brain mechanisms preceding complex emotion processing and investigate a potential intervention for children who face challenges with emotion identification, such as those with autism spectrum disorder.