Amanda joined the Graham Behavioral Medicine Lab in February 2021 and is currently a PhD candidate planning to graduate in May 2026. She completed her undergraduate degree in architecture at Rice University and her M.S. at CSU in psychology under Dr. Graham. Her research identifies built environmental factors affecting health and social behaviors and utilizes virtual reality (VR).

She views extended reality (i.e., VR, augmented reality, and mixed reality) as enhancing conventional built environmental research by enabling manipulation of environments while maintaining randomization and control. Leveraging her background in architectural design, she leads our team in developing experimental methods using VR to study how street design influences transportation decisions. With her career in applied research, she intends to use novel technology to study physical activity and its built environmental determinants in order to promote health at the population-level as an independent investigator on multidisciplinary teams, collaborating with extended reality experts, behavioral scientists, and design practitioners.

In her spare time, she runs and hikes. Since she grew up in Southern California, she enjoys almost any activity in the sunshine! She also loves to bake desserts and travel to visit her two sisters. 

Email: amanda.spitzer@colostate.edu

Twitter/X: @spitzer_amanda

Skylar joined the lab in May 2021 as a post-baccalaureate research assistant, and now she is a fourth-year graduate student in the Applied Social and Health Psychology doctoral program. Skylar earned her B.A. degree from Carleton College in psychology in 2021. After graduation, she has been working with Dr. Dan Graham here at Colorado State University on promoting daily physical activities among college students. Her current research focuses on sedentary time reduction using activity-permissive workstations (APWs), and the impact of APWs on mood, stress, and cognitive performance. 

In her leisure time, she is a blogger sharing her recipe and her life oversea with 3000+ followers on social media. 

Email: skylar.yu@colostate.edu

Twitter/X: @skylar_yiqing

Personal Website: https://sites.google.com/view/yiqing-skylar-yu/home 

Katie joined the lab in August of 2022 and now is a fourth-year graduate student in the Applied Social and Health Psychology doctoral program. During her undergraduate experience at the University of Pittsburgh, Katie was involved in four different research labs with varying foci of social justice, eating disorders, and healthy aging and inflammation. Her research interests narrowed to health behaviors and outcomes after completing her honors thesis project on the relationship between diet, adiposity and inflammation and were strengthened through working with underserved populations facing health issues at a crisis accommodation center in Sydney, Australia.

After graduating, Katie worked as a neuroimaging research assistant on an exercise intervention research study in Pittsburgh, contributing to her passion for health behavior interventions work. Her current research interests are focused on intuitive eating practices in the workplace. More specifically, she is curious about how our work environment cue or prohibit intuitive eating. Katie is collecting qualitative data of workers to understand these eating behavior trends at work.

When she is not in research mode, Katie is often busy creating new recipes in the kitchen, painting outdoors, journaling and biking on trails with friends. 

Email: katie.mcmahon@colostate.edu