My name is Navid Amarlou, and I am an undergraduate researcher majoring in Psychology at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB). As a scholar in the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Center (UROC), I conduct interdisciplinary, community-driven research focused on how identity, cognition, and environmental contexts shape human outcomes. My work is anchored in environmental psychology and psychologically informed design, drawing from social and educational psychology to examine how people construct meaning from adversity and success, and how institutions and environments can support well-being through more equitable and responsive design.

Selected Work (Current and Recent Projects)

• Environmental engagement, access, and equity (Ventana Wildlife Society). I design and implement evaluation and research tools that translate psychological theory into community-useful measurement. A central project is a county-wide environmental attitudes and access survey examining how demographics, health constraints, and structural barriers shape outdoor engagement and pro-environmental behavior. This work integrates validated psychological measures, structured sampling approaches, bilingual community engagement, and a reporting workflow designed to support both methodological rigor and local usability.

• Nature exposure and adolescent mental health (field-based evaluation). In parallel, I conduct field-based evaluation of nature-based programming for adolescents, measuring pre/post changes in well-being and symptoms of anxiety and depression using brief validated screening tools. This work reflects my broader interest in nature exposure as a psychologically meaningful context; one that can support mental health while also reproducing inequities if access and belonging are not explicitly measured and addressed. I also contribute to collaborative measurement development for ParksRx-style wellness and environmental engagement initiatives, with an emphasis on creating standardized instruments that support cross-site learning and scalable program improvement.

• Urban stress, lived experience, and institutional indicators (digital trace + archival comparison). A second thread of my research examines how people narrate and interpret environmental stressors in everyday life, particularly in urban contexts. I am analyzing thematically coded urban stressors from large-scale Reddit data (including r/nyc) and comparing these lived-experience accounts with archival indicators of urban stress to evaluate convergence and divergence between institutional metrics and community reality. This work is central to my interest in psychologically informed design: the idea that “environment” includes not only physical space, but also the social and institutional systems that shape felt safety, identity, and opportunity.

Research Training and Lab Experience

My research training began in the Perplexing Questions Lab under Dr. Katie Grobman, where I contributed to projects spanning creativity, moral cognition, educational success predictors, and identity development. These early studies trained me in core research practices, including IRB-related writing, measure development, literature synthesis, and quantitative and mixed-methods analysis. I also co-authored a chapter with Dr. Grobman in A Psychology Toolbox: Creative Class Activities that Support Students’ Growth and Development, reflecting on sleep deprivation through an integration of narrative framing and empirical insight.

During Dr. Grobman’s sabbatical, I continued my training with Dr. Mrinal Sinha on a qualitative study of academically successful Latinx students. Using structured interviews and systematic coding, we examined how students explained educational setbacks and challenged deficit-based narratives commonly used to describe student outcomes. A central component of this work involved qualitative rigor: developing coding frameworks, evaluating intercoder reliability with Krippendorff’s alpha, and using bootstrapping approaches to assess stability and confidence in coding agreement. This work has been presented at the Western Psychological Association and campus research symposia, and it informs my ongoing interest in how institutional language shapes both psychological experience and intervention design.

Building on my interests in attribution, persistence, and educational equity, I also collaborated with Professor Gabriel Chavez in evaluating peer-led study groups and student success in lower-division mathematics. Using course-level data and psychological measures, we examined how student attributions, attendance, and engagement predicted academic performance. This work strengthened my commitment to research that is theory-driven but operational; designed to generate actionable insight for learning support systems rather than simply describing disparities.

I am also a Research Assistant in the Environmental Psychology Lab at New York University, where I contribute to research on humane environmental design in secure settings. This work examines how institutional environments, including prisons and jails, shape psychological outcomes for incarcerated people and institutional staff, and it has deepened my interest in built environments as psychological systems with measurable cognitive, emotional, and social consequences.

Professional Scholarship and Communication

Across these projects, I have presented research through posters, talks, and invited lectures, including guest presentations at CSUMB and the University of California, Santa Cruz. I was also invited to speak at TEDx Waves to share work reframing student “failure” through psychological and systems-based perspectives. I am currently preparing manuscripts connected to my work in environmental engagement, urban stress measurement, and deficit-based narratives in education, and I intend to continue developing scholarship that is both publishable and publicly useful.

Research Interests

My academic work centers environmental psychology and psychologically informed design: how built and natural environments shape identity, meaning-making, and health, and how those effects are distributed across social contexts. I am especially interested in environmental values, attribution and interpretation processes, place-based stressors, and equity-centered measurement that can inform more inclusive design and policy. Methodologically, I work across qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods, with a consistent focus on translation; building research tools and evidence that communities and institutions can act on.

Future Directions

I intend to pursue a Ph.D. to deepen my training in environmental psychology and related social/personality processes, while continuing applied, community-partnered work. My long-term goal is to become a professor and scholar who advances equity-centered measurement, psychologically informed design, and research-practice partnerships that connect rigorous methods with public impact.

Methods & Tools: mixed methods; survey design; qualitative interviewing + reliability (Krippendorff’s alpha); quantitative analysis (R/SPSS); program evaluation; digital trace data (Reddit); measurement development, Geospatial representative data with use of ArcGIS for mapping.