Graduate Students

Ilana Huz, M.A.

Ilana is a Ph.D. candidate in Developmental Psychology with a focus on Children, Families, and Cultures. She also applies this expertise as a Research Scientist at Child Trends in the Reproductive Health and Family Formation program area. Prior to graduate school, she received a Bachelor's degree in Psychology and Education Studies from Brandeis University and supported clinical research trials regarding treatment for mood and anxiety disorders.

Currently, Ilana is working on her Dissertation project focused on trajectories of loneliness from adolescence to emerging adulthood and the individual and contextual factors that predict continuity and discontinuity in these longitudinal patterns.

Judy McDonald

Judy is a third-year Ph.D. student in Catholic University's Clinical Psychology program. Prior to coming to CatholicU, Judy worked as a lab manager and research assistant at the Infancy Studies Lab of Rutgers University - Newark, where she aided in EEG and behavioral studies examining infant brain and language development. She hopes to continue learning about human development—both physiological and social emotional—through her research and clinical experiences. Her current research is focused on the role of physiological regulation on the links between personality and substance use problems in emerging adulthood.

Emma Heffron

Emma is a first-year Ph.D. student in Catholic University's Developmental Psychology program. Prior to attending Catholic University, Emma worked at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore as a research assistant for the Schizophrenia Center. At the Schizophrenia Center she was able to study how childhood experiences (i.e. trauma) may have acted as a risk factor for schizophrenia onset, as well as other longitudinal studies. She hopes to continue to learn about individuals' social emotional health as well as the body and minds response to traumatic familial events, such as divorce or loss of a parent, throughout development.

Emily Fair, M.S.

Emily is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Developmental Psychology program, having earned her MA here in 2018 and an MS in Biobehavioral Health from Penn State University. Her research interests focus on the role of interoception in the development of risk-taking.

Daniel Saba

Daniel is a first-year M.A. student in Catholic University's Psychological Science program. Prior to graduate school, Daniel earned a bachelor's degree in Philosophy from Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, CA. He began work in business as a Sourcing Analyst at Elevance Health, Inc. and became fascinated with organizational psychology. This led him to transition career tracks and join the Psychological Science program at CUA. Daniel's research interests center on the role of individual differences in temperament — such as emotional sensitivity, resilience, impulsivity, and neuroticism — in contributing to the onset and progress of depression and anxiety in emerging adults.

Jackson Gasperecz

Jackson is a second-year M.A. student in Catholic University's Psychological Science program. Prior to graduate school at CUA, Jackson earned his B.A. in Psychology in 2021 from Trinity University in San Antonio, TX. After college, Jackson worked across two departments at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston in Galveston, TX working in both dating violence research and youth trauma, depression, and suicide research. In the PDL. Jackson aims expand his knowledge of close relationships, mother-child attachment, resilience as a developmental trajectory, and both dyadic and longitudinal data analysis.

Ariana Chalkias

Ariana is a first-year Ph.D. student in Catholic University's SCAN Psychology program. Prior to graduate school, she earned her B.S. in Neuroscience in 2025 from University of Maryland, College Park. During her undergrad, Ariana conducted research at UMD's Child Development Lab exploring the neural underpinnings of later anxiety development, as well as the relationship between positive affect and language development in infants. In the PDL, Ariana hopes to continue to learn more about the neural correlates of positive affect and exuberant temperament, as well as behavioral trajectories of adolescents and emerging adults with this temperament profile.

Lizzie Tandilashvili

Lizzie is a first-year Ph.D. student in Catholic University's Clinical Psychology program. Prior to attending Catholic, Lizzie worked as a research assistant in the Emotion and Development Branch at the National Institute of Mental Health, where she studied how risk factors can influence child psychopathology and inform the development of interventions for children and their families. She hopes to continue to learn about individual and contextual factors that influence emotion and behavior throughout development. She is particularly interested in how parenting behaviors and emotion regulation relate to child outcomes.

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