Current and recent graduate students

Shannon Gair is a third year graduate student. Before coming to UMass, she worked at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in the OCD and Related Disorders Program and the Seaver Autism Center. Her research interests involve the development of emotion competence in children with psychological disorders, from a behavioral and neurobiological perspective, with a particular focus on ADHD. She is also interested in early diagnosis and early intervention for children with ADHD.

Sungha Kang is a fourth year graduate student. Her research interests involve ethnic and racial disparities in ADHD assessment and diagnosis. In particular, her master's thesis aims to examine the mechanisms associated with perceptions of ADHD-related behaviors in African American children, such as cultural expectations of child behavior, stigma related to mental disorders, and experiences with discrimination.

Hallie Brown is a fifth year graduate student. Her research interests surround early behavioral markers of ADHD and factors that influence the early development of behavior disorders, in particular, family environment and parenting. Her master’s thesis aims to examine the psychometric properties of ADHD symptoms in toddlers.

Recent Graduates

Rosanna Breaux is a recent graduate who completed her internship at Penn State Hershey Medical Center and is now completing a post-doc at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her research interests include examining parent-child interactions and child, parental, and environmental, factors that influence functioning in young children with behavior problems over time. Rosanna's dissertation examined mechanisms explaining the relation between family dysfunction and child hyperactivity during the preschool years. In addition to working with Dr. Harvey, Rosanna collaborated (along with Dr. Harvey) with Dr. Julia McQuade at Amherst College, examining factors that relate to social bias, emotion regulation, and aggression in children with ADHD.

Claudia Lugo-Candelas is a recent graduate from the clinical psychology program. Her early graduate work explored the influence of culture in parents’ emotion socialization practices. Her dissertation, in collaboration with the McDermott Learning Lab, focused in better understanding the neural correlates of emotion processing in hyperactive and typically developing preschoolers. She is interested in better understanding, at neural and behavioral levels, what factors (individual, familial, and cultural) contribute to emotion dysregulation and the pathways and mechanisms though which dysregulation develops into psychopathology in preschoolers. She completed her clinical internship at the Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center in the Bronx and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Translational Research Training in Child Psychiatry in the Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons.