Research info

Psychology and Education Department Faculty Research information 

Fall 2023

Katherine Binder studies the role of context in the process of reading. The results of her research have been published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, and the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.

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Mara Breen uses cognitive and brain imaging methods to explore how the musical aspects of language (pitch and rhythm) help people understand speech and facilitate literacy acquisition.

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Melissa Burch’s research centers on the development of memory. She has conducted research using behavioral memory tasks with infants, studying the development of autobiographical memory in the context of parent-child conversations, and examining the role of emotion in adults’ autobiographical memory. She is interested in characteristics of narratives for personal stories as well as parent-child book reading interactions.

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Corey Flanders' work focuses on addressing social issues and promoting positive social change. In particular, she uses tools from Psychology, Gender Studies, and Public Health to investigate concerns related to identity and health equity among marginalized communities with an emphasis on working with young queer and trans people.

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KC Haydon’s research examines the developmental origins of how people behave in their closest relationships. She studies how romantic partners’ individual developmental histories affect what happens in their current relationship – how they resolve conflicts, regulate and express emotions, support each other, and handle interpersonal stress. KC's work incorporates attachment and psychophysiology to understand how stress and interpersonal relationships affect health, including sleep, substance use, and psychological distress. 

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Travis Hodges' primary research interests involve sex differences in stress, depressive symptoms, and negative cognition across development. As a behavioral neuroscience lab, he specializes in uncovering mechanisms in the brain and periphery that underlie behaviors related to stress and depression. Many therapeutic approaches currently available vary in effectiveness and this might be due to the lack of consideration of age and sex. Laying the sex- and age-specific groundwork of mechanisms involved in mental health symptoms and stress outcomes will help in the development of much more effective treatments for these behaviors. In rat models of depressive symptoms, he examines the involvement of multiple factors - neuronal activation and networks, hormones, inflammation, neurogenesis, and gut microbiota. 

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Jennifer Jacoby is interested in how both learners and teachers develop in school contexts. In particular, she seeks to understand how teachers can best support the learning of linguistically and socio-economically diverse groups of children, adolescents, and young adults. She uses both qualitative and quantitative methods in her research. 

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Jackson Matos is interested in the role of equality and liberation in learning communities. Matos' research has two distinct areas. In the first area, Matos examines how Latinx student, family, and community assets can be utilized to enhance the system of education in the U.S. In the second area, he examines the effect of social justice frameworks on pedagogy and policies.

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Kelley O’Carroll is interested in the roles that families and teachers play in young children’s learning and development in racially, ethnically and socioeconomically diverse families. Specifically, O’Carroll’s research has examined parent social support, social capital and family-school relationships in young children’s school readiness. She has also studied the impact of professional development on early childhood teachers’ partnerships with families, and she is interested in the factors that support sustained change in teacher practices after professional development. O’Carroll uses both quantitative and qualitative research methods in community-based settings.

Becky Wai-Ling Packard is interested in the intersection of motivation, identity, and mentoring. She aims, she says, "to understand how young people without easily identifiable role models and mentors in career domains manage to find the mentoring they need and sustain their desired possible selves, or who they hope to become in the future."

Packard's research focuses on mentoring, with an emphasis on how individuals such as first-generation college students, women, and persons of color construct mentoring networks as they navigate complex pathways toward higher education and work. She frequently speaks on these topics at the local, state, and national level. She also offers expert advice on ways to design mentoring and advising initiatives for students and faculty.

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Jared Schwartzer is a behavioral neuroscientist studying how various environmental factors during pregnancy impact offspring brain and behavioral health. His work has focused on topics of maternal inflammation, air pollution, and electronic cigarette use during pregnancy to understand the neurodevelopmental impacts of various public health issues. His lab uses a combination of behavioral observations and biological diagnostic tools to identify biomarkers that link behavior differences to brain inflammation. This work highlights the importance of a gene-environment interaction, such as genetic predisposition, when evaluating the adverse effects of environmental insults.

Ongoing research in the Schwartzer lab focuses on the growing field of immune-induced mental health by translating clinical observations into testable hypotheses. This work lies at the intersection of behavioral neuroscience, neuroimmunology, and biomedical research to identify how interactions between the immune system and nervous system throughout gestation shape offspring brain and behavior development. We employ a range of molecular and behavioral approaches to untangle the complex gene-environment interactions that lead to neurodevelopmental disorders.

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Balbir Singh's research, broadly speaking, examines how people perceive others (social perception). More specifically, Singh is interested in how race impacts face recognition, identification, and intergroup relations. He has ongoing projects that examine how we recognize people of other races and how misidentifications impact minority targets. He is also exploring why a person's race is cognitively salient with people we know. 

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John Tawa's research, broadly speaking, examines the role of race in intergroup interactions. More specifically, Tawa is particularly interested in relations between minority groups (e.g., relations between Black people and Asians). Some of his research supports the idea that perceived competition for resources (e.g., educational, economic) creates greater distance between Black people and Asians relative to both their distances towards the White majority group. The second line of Tawa’s research examines the ways in which people’s essentialist beliefs about race influence their intergroup behaviors.

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