Amanda is a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Social and Health Psychology at Colorado State University and plans to graduate in May 2026. She earned her B.A. in Architecture from Rice University (magna cum laude) and her M.S. in Psychology at CSU under Dr. Dan Graham. Her research employs virtual reality (VR) to identify and modify built environmental factors that influence physical activity and health behaviors.

Drawing on her background in architectural design, Amanda leads the development of experimental VR methods to study how street design impacts walking behavior. Her dissertation uses VR to promote outdoor walking on a college campus. She views emerging technologies as tools to enhance traditional environmental research by enabling high-quality, in-context data collection and identifying novel intervention opportunities. Amanda collaborates with multidisciplinary teams, including computer scientists, behavioral researchers, and design practitioners, to advance population-level health promotion.

Outside of research, she enjoys running, hiking, baking desserts, and traveling to visit her two sisters.

Email: amanda.spitzer@colostate.edu

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 recipes and her life overseas 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 2022 and is currently 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, including social justice, eating disorders, and healthy aging and inflammation. Her research interests narrowed to health behaviors and outcomes after completing her honors thesis on the relationship between diet, adiposity, and inflammation, and were further strengthened through her work 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 study in Pittsburgh, contributing to her passion for health behavior intervention research. Her current research interests focus on the intersection of intuitive eating and the workplace. More specifically, her master’s thesis examined why intuitive eating programs are not more common in workplace wellness initiatives. Katie expanded this work by implementing an intuitive eating program within an organization and will evaluate the program at multiple time points for her dissertation.

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

Email: katie.mcmahon@colostate.edu