I'm Navid Amarlou, an undergraduate researcher at California State University, Monterey Bay, majoring in Psychology with a minor in Statistics. As a scholar in the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Center (UROC), I study how identity, cognition, and environment shape wellbeing, and how spaces and institutions can be built to support people more equitably. My work lives at the intersection of environmental and social psychology, and it keeps circling one question: how do the places and stories around us decide who belongs and who gets pushed out? That question was something I lived before it was something I studied. I grew up first-generation and gay, bilingual in Farsi, rarely seeing my own identities reflected in the rooms I walked into. For a long time, I moved through those rooms like a foreigner, present but never quite expected. Later, commuting to college while managing real financial pressure, I kept searching for a space that felt like mine and kept not finding one, until programs like TRIO Student Support Services finally gave me somewhere to stand. Those years taught me something I have never let go of: belonging is not automatic. It depends on whether the spaces and institutions around you were ever built with you in mind. That conviction is why so much of my work happens beyond the lab: writing grants for underserved youth at the Furnace Teen Center, advising schools on the structural barriers facing their students and families, and mentoring first-time researchers looking for the same foothold I once needed. It is also the thread running through everything I study. Whether I am reframing student "failure" as a structural rather than personal problem, measuring how access to nature affects adolescent mental health, or examining how institutional environments shape wellbeing, I am really asking one thing from many angles: how environments and narratives include or exclude people, and what measurement and design choices can change that.

My training began in the Perplexing Questions Lab under Dr. Katie Grobman, where I worked across creativity, identity, moral cognition, and predictors of student success, and learned the fundamentals of the craft: IRB protocol writing, measure development, literature synthesis, and quantitative and qualitative analysis. With Dr. Grobman, I co-authored a book chapter for A Psychology Toolbox (APA, Society for the Teaching of Psychology). With Dr. Mrinal Sinha, I studied how academically successful Latinx students explain educational setbacks, using structured interviews and systematic coding. This work grounded me in qualitative rigor, from building coding frameworks to testing inter-coder reliability with Krippendorff's alpha and bootstrapped confidence intervals, and sharpened my interest in how institutional language shapes psychological experience. We have shared it at the Western Psychological Association, TEDx, and campus symposia. With Gabriel Chavez (Arizona State University), I evaluated peer-led study groups in lower-division mathematics, examining how students' attributions and engagement predicted success; the work earned an Outstanding Poster Award at MAA MathFest. That interest in how institutions shape psychological experience has since become the center of my research. 

That interest in how institutions shape psychological experience has since become the center of my research. As a Research Assistant in the Environmental Psychology Lab at New York University with Dr. Richard Wener, I conducted a literature review on the design and structure of adolescent carceral systems, asking what juvenile detention and corrections facilities actually do to the young people they hold. Dr. Wener's environmental psychology of prisons and jails gave the project its conceptual anchor; my task was to test how far a framework built on adult facilities holds for adolescents, whose developmental sensitivity makes crowding, isolation, and institutional climate far more consequential. I organized more than sixty sources into a thematic structure that separates direct juvenile evidence from adult extrapolation, and co-authored a symposium abstract and research poster with Dr. Wener arguing that carceral settings are developmentally active environments rather than neutral containers for punishment. The work changed how I see built environments. They are measurable psychological systems, places whose scale, sensory conditions, and social climate can be studied, evaluated, and redesigned.

I carry that lens into applied work with the Ventana Wildlife Society, where every study is built to hand a community something usable. A county-wide survey maps who has access to nature and who does not; a field evaluation of forest bathing tests whether nature-based programming can move adolescent anxiety and depression; ongoing measurement development supports ParksRx-style wellness initiatives. In parallel, I study how people describe urban stress in their own words, coding large-scale Reddit accounts against archival indicators to see where official metrics and lived experience agree, and where they quietly diverge.

I am drawn to environmental psychology and psychologically informed design: how built and natural environments shape identity, meaning, and health, and how those effects are distributed unequally across communities. I am especially interested in place-based stress, environmental values and access, spatial belonging, and equity-centered measurement, and in the deeper question of how space is produced and for whom. Methodologically, I work across qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods, with a consistent emphasis on translating findings into practice. I intend to pursue a Ph.D. in environmental (and social or personality) psychology while continuing community-partnered work. My long-term goal is to become a professor whose scholarship advances equity-centered measurement, psychologically informed design, and research-practice partnerships that connect rigorous methods with public impact, and who helps the next generation of first-time researchers find their footing.