Recent PhD Graduates

Name: Samantha Bowden '24

Dissertation Title: Investigating the role of a novel oxytocinergic neural pathway in the modulation of male and female juvenile social play

Samantha designed three sets of experiments to test the hypothesis that juvenile social play is modulated through a hypothalamic-striatal OXTergic pathway. Her findings indicate persistent OXT mediated sex differences in juvenile social behaviors, in which NAc-OXT signaling increases female social play behavior but may decrease male social play behavior. These findings could inform clinicians of the potential need for sex-specific OXT-based therapeutics in the treatment of social deficits.

Name: Allison Costello '24

Dissertation Title: Light, orexin, and SAD: A mechanistic study using a diurnal rodent model

Allison's dissertation uses a combination of behavioral, pharmacological, and molecular approaches to reveal sex-specific behavioral and neural responses in sleep/wake, depression-like behavior, as well as neuroplasticity and neuroinflammatory markers to light and to orexin. Allison's findings support the hypothesis that the orexinergic system mediates the effects of ambient light on mood, and identifies the orexinergic system as a novel therapeutic target in Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).

Name: Megan Mikhail '25

Dissertation Title: Disadvantage and Disordered Eating: Examining Phenotypic and Genotype X Environment Associations Across Development

Internship: University of California San Francisco clinical psychology training program. Megan worked with the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Team.

Name: Sarah Carroll '25

Dissertation Title: The Origins of Antisocial Behavior: Influences of Genes, Development, and Context

Internship: Rochester Institute of Technology

Name: Alexandra Vazquez '25

Dissertation Title: Illuminating the Developmental Etiology of Youth Resilience

Internship: Denver Health Medical Center, the biggest safety-net hospital in Denver that works with under-resourced populations.

Name: Dominic Roberts '25

Dissertation Title: Exploring Relationships Between Temporal Processing Deficits and Psychosis Using the Peak Interval Task

Internship: Nevada Psychology Internship Consortium

Name: Courtney Louis '24

Dissertation Title: Worry and Working Memory Function: Investigating Interactive Effects of Worry, Basal Dopamine and Estradiol on Theta-Gamma Coupling in a Female Sample

Internship: Pre-doctoral clinical fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School

Name: Aksheya Sridhar '24

Dissertation Title: Implementation Strategy Mapping Methods: Piloting Concept Mapping Within Community-Mental Health Agencies Providing Services to Autistic Youth

Internship: Aksheya completed the Autism Track at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. Through this program, Aksheya gained additional experience working with autistic youth across a range of ages and settings.

Name: Diondra Straiton '24

Dissertation Title: Examining the Active Ingredients of Group Consultation to Improve the Implementation of a Parent Coaching Intervention for Medicaid-Enrolled Autistic Children

Internship: Diondra completed her predoctoral internship at the University of Pennsylvania on the Child/Development Disabilities track. Diondra worked in the Penn Medicine Autism Clinic, in the PATCH Anxiety Clinic, and has two rotations in the Philadelphia public school district.

Name: Lauren Wiklund '24

Dissertation Title: Sexual Well-Being Among Queer Women of Color

Internship: Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

Name: Beau Zhang '26

Dissertation Title: Dissecting the biphasic pupil responses to perceptual switches during bistability

This dissertation explores possible causes for the biphasic pattern. Across two experiments, Dr. Zhang found evidence supporting that both early dilation component and the constriction component are associated with spontaneous perceptual switches, with the former being the product of endogenous mechanisms driving switches and the latter being the result of changes in visual cortical responses at switch moments.

Name: Erin Neaton '25

Dissertation Title: The effects of Transient Error of the Predictive Validity of Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices with Multiple Administration

This dissertation investigates the effects of multiple administrations on the predictive validity of the Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices (RAPM). The results of this study provide evidence for a small, but significant, retest effect on RAPM scores and for stable predictive validity of RAPM across multiple administrations.

Name: Toni Smith '25

Dissertation Title: Inadvertent entertainment and selective attention: an investigation into the effects of background rhythm on temporal and non-temporal judgements using simple tone sequence

This dissertation advances our understanding of auditory selective attention by demonstrating that even when a temporally regular stimulus is something to be intentionally ignored, its rhythm may draw attention and influence perception in subtle ways.

Name: Andrew Rodriguez '25

Dissertation Title: Implicit Feature-Based Suppression is Effective at Guiding Attention, Even with Strong Target Guidance, While Explicit Feature-Based Suppression is Ineffective

Evidence for feature-based suppression (FBS) in visual search literature has been controversial and mixed. This dissertation suggests that implicit FBS can effectively allocate attention while explicit FBS is ineffective unless there is ample training of the to-be-ignored feature, limiting its utility as a real-world mechanism for guiding attention. Furthermore, when multiple implicit mechanisms are available to guide visual attention, only one implicit mechanism can be encoded and utilized. 

Name: Abigail Mundorf '24

Dissertation Title: Automatic and Controlled Influences on Memory Organizations

Abigail's dissertation uses computational modeling to examine the automatic and controlled mechanisms that determine how we navigate through our memories. For example, events are often recalled in the same order they were experienced, but it is unclear if his organization occurs automatically or if it is a result of internal strategies. Across four experiments, Abigail found evidence that order information is both learned and retrieved automatically, but intentional strategies also play an important role in guiding memory search.

Name: Jessica Saucedo '25

Dissertation Title: Cultural, Relational, and Community Influences on Indigenous Early Childhood Development

This dissertation centers the experiences of Indigenous children in the U.S. through a community-engaged, qualitative study. By using a participatory framework and drawing from a Photovoice project conducted with the Wiba Anung partnership, this dissertation offers practical insights for Tribal early childhood programs and models ethical, culturally grounded research that uplifts Indigenous knowledge and promotes cultural continuity.

Name: Taylor Martin '25

Dissertation Title:  Expert Consensus on Practices, Facilitators, and Barriers of Community Engaged Learning: A Delphi Study

Community engaged learning (CEL) is a promising pedagogical approach to higher education that promotes mutually beneficial partnerships with communities, but there are no well-established best practices for CEL. To address this gap, Taylor conducted a two-phase delphi study. Her findings inform recommendations for best practices in CEL implementation and provide information pertaining to factors that impact its implementation.

Name: Mallet Reid '24

Dissertation Title:  Hindering Health Equity: Oppression and Whiteness Pervade Trauma, Substance Use, and Therapy

Co-occurring posttraumatic stress disorder and substance use disorder (PTSD/SUD) is a serious public health issue affecting millions. People of color endure chronic and severe cases of PTSD/SUD due to their heightened exposure to common risk factors and to unique risk factors associated with the disorder. Mallet's dissertation found that oppression significantly contributes to PTSD/SUD incidence, exposure to discrimination exacerbates PTSD/SUD symptoms, and people of color wanted to address these issues in therapy. When they did attempt to address these issues in therapy, though, clinicians often invalidated their experiences or were underprepared to address them.

Name: Rosaura Domínguez-Rebollar '24

Dissertation Title: The Potential for Targeted Continuous Quality Improvement to Enhance College Integrated Student Supports for Latine Students: A Case Study

Rosaura used a mixed methods case study to test whether a targeted Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) approach is a feasible, acceptable, and appropriate method for improving MSU's College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP) to more holistically support and promote the retention of Latine migrant farm-working students.

Name: Jasmine Engleton '24

Dissertation Title: Black Women’s Experiences Healing from Sexual Assault and Institutional Betrayal by the Criminal Legal System: A Qualitative Exploration

Drawing on Black feminist and intersectional frameworks, Jasmine’s dissertation focused on the healing trajectories of Black female sexual assault survivors with previously untested kits and their intersections with the criminal legal system. Jasmine found that those who experienced prolonged institutional betrayal from the criminal legal system were less likely to seek help resources, which delayed their healing process.

Name: Nathan Baker '25

Dissertation Title: The Right Support: How the Effects of Help Vary Based on Individual Perceptions and Needs

Workplace help is widely recognized for enhancing employee well-being and performance, yet its potential to yield negative outcomes remains poorly understood due to the lack of a unified theoretical framework, passive views of help recipients, and limited focus on recipients’ key psychological factors. This dissertation addresses these issues by integrating Conservation of Resources theory and Self-Determination Theory to examine how help perceptions influence acceptance and outcomes through basic psychological needs (autonomy, competence, relatedness).

Name: Josh Pearman '25

Dissertation Title: Estimating the Accuracy of Team Mental Models Through Transition-Phase Information Sharing: A Neural Graphic Matching Approach

In this research, Josh applied modern neural network NLP techniques to the task of measuring dynamic information networks from team communications. Results indicated that during planning phases, information accuracy has a dynamic relationship with performance, as teams monitor and adapt their strategies over time to achieve high performance. His dissertation presents initial validity evidence for a technique that estimates the information accuracy of team mental models. 

Name: Emily Gerkin '25

Dissertation Title: Beyond a Seat at the Table: Investigating Leaders' Gender Differences in Organizational Strategy Network Involvement

Are women leaders participating in strategic conversations at the same rate as their men counterparts, or are they still on the sidelines? Emily's dissertation addressed this question by drawing from theory and research at the intersection of gender and networks. Results showed that rather than being excluded from strategic conversations as the gender and networks literature might suggest, women appear to develop alternative networking approaches that can effectively increase their involvement in strategy networks.

Name: Jo Alanis Barker '24

Dissertation Title: An Examination of Immigrant Workers' Experiences of Overqualification Using Relative Deprivation Theory 

Jo's dissertation focuses on the overqualification experiences of immigrant workers in the United States, one population that is particularly affected by overqualification. In this work, a model of perceived overqualification was built that investigated feelings of relative deprivation, or the sense that one is deprived of something compared to others, as well as the impact of factors unique to the immigrant experience, such as acculturation. Through this research, Dr. Alanis Barker aimed to identify strategies organizations and individuals can adopt to reduce the negative consequences of perceived overqualification. 

Name: Connor Eichenauer '24

Dissertation Title: A Model of User Reactions Toward and Beliefs About Selection Procedures 

Connor's dissertation investigates how employee selection decision-makers choose to utilize (or not) candidate information from different selection procedures when evaluating candidates. The goal of this research is to identify why hiring managers often do not utilize the most valid predictors when making selection decisions, which would facilitate the development of interventions to improve the predictive accuracy of selection decisions by reducing science-practice gaps.

Name: Shree Vallabha '25

Dissertation Title: Moral Humility: An Antidote to the Dark Side of Morality

Morality has a dark side. Our moral tendencies breed rigidity, conflict, extremism, hate, intolerance, and violence. In this dissertation, Shree proposed moral humility as one antidote to these dark features of our morality. Throughout the project, she found that moral humility was associated with lower levels of polarization across a range of outcomes. It was associated with lower antipathy and antagonism towards outgroup, lower rigidity in one's own political views, and lower rejection of compromise and contact, amongst other outcomes. Taken together, this project is the first comprehensive investigation into moral humility.

Name: Brian Brutzman '24

Dissertation Title: Change For The Better: Assessing Readiness to Adopt Applied Behavior Analysis in Michigan Public Schools

Many students diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder need evidence-based intervention in school, and applied behavior analysis (ABA) offers an array of treatment options shown to improve outcomes. However, in Michigan, ABA has not been thoroughly integrated into public schools. Brian’s dissertation assessed the mechanisms thought to predict organizational readiness for change among Michigan public educators faced with the potential adoption of specialized ABA classrooms.

Name: Alejandro Carillo '24

Dissertation Title: Examining Racial Bias in Evidence Accumulation: Exploring the Impact of Object Search

Alejandro’s dissertation investigates the role of racial biases in weapon identification, exploring how race affects search efficiency and evidence accumulation in complex visual settings. This study extends our insight into decision-making in critical scenarios, offering a new perspective on the dynamics of racial biases.

Name: Mariah Purol '24

Dissertation Title: Post-Traumatic Growth Across Partners and in Relationships

In a series of three studies, Mariah examined trajectories of post-traumatic personality change for individuals and their romantic partners. Each study used dyadic growth curve modeling to parse apart patterns of personality change, determine if experiencing ostensibly negative life events (directly or vicariously) influences these patterns, and examine the role of potentially influential relationship characteristics (e.g., relationship satisfaction, support, responsiveness). Using data from three longitudinal panel studies (i.e., HRS, LISS, and CouPers), she examined these questions in a total sample of over 7,500 couples.

Name: Prachi Solanki '24

Dissertation Title: Testing Impression Formation from a Bayesian Perspective

Prachi's dissertation aimed to answer the question, "How do people combine various sources of information when forming impressions of others?" Past social cognition research has identified two broad types of information that can impact impression formation: individuating information and categorical (stereotype) information. Prachi's goal was to move beyond this traditional distinction - which assumes stereotype information to be the base rate or prior - by exploring if both types of information can be combined and used within a Bayesian framework. This work also links social-cognitive work in impression formation with the broader literature on Bayesian decision-making in cognitive psychology.