Dr. Jeremy Hamm is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at NDSU. After earning his Ph.D. at the University of Manitoba and completing an internship at the Institute for Psychogerontology at the University of Nuremberg, he completed two nationally-funded postdocs at the University of California, Irvine and Concordia University. His research examines the role of motivational and self-regulatory processes in adaptive development across the adult lifespan. Dr. Hamm’s research in this area has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Deutscher Academischer Austausch Dienst (German DAAD). He has received early career awards for his research on adult development and aging from the Association for Psychological Science (Rising Star Award) and the American Psychological Association (D20 Springer Award). 

Email: jeremy.hamm@ndsu.edu

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Dr. Kelly Parker is a postdoctoral research fellow in the MHAD lab. She completed a PhD in health, nutrition, and exercise science with a dual major in gerontology at North Dakota State University in 2023. Her research centers on lifestyle factors that influence health and the aging process, especially the roles of nutrition and exercise habits. Her previous work has examined various small-steps interventions to improve diet and physical activity with the end goal of seeing intermediate to long-term behavior and health impacts related to oxidative stress reduction. Her current research is focused on the role of modifiable health behaviors (nutrition, physical activity) in protecting against age-related declines in cognitive functioning.

Email: kelly.burdett@ndsu.edu 

Matthew is a graduate student at North Dakota State University, whose alma mater is the University of Minnesota, Morris. He is interested in motivation- and control-related factors that can protect health and wellbeing in adults, and how those factors are affected by disparities among underprivileged populations, especially regarding people with low socioeconomic status. My research will focus on how perceived control affected wellbeing over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic and for which groups these perceptions of control are most advantageous. 

Email: matthew.pierce.2@ndsu.edu 

Laura Klepacz is a Ph.D. student who joined the MHAD lab in Summer 2023 after completing her Masters degree at Northern Arizona University. Her research interests cover a wide range of topics in psychology including motivation, cognition, development, and neuropsychology. Laura is especially interested in how individual differences between people, such as their perceptions of control, can influence cognitive performance. Laura’s thesis work focused on the potential relationship between ADHD and levels of cognitive variability in older adults. Her future work will investigate the motivational and self-regulatory predictors of daily cognitive performance and possible patterns in indices of cognitive variability.  

Email: laura.klepacz@ndsu.edu 

Jaron completed his honors thesis in the MHAD lab in 2021. His thesis focused on the relationship between self-regulatory factors and well-being during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a nationally-representative sample of 300 U.S. adults, Jaron's thesis findings showed that the ability to reengage with new attainable goals after major setbacks (goal reengagement capacity) buffered against losses in mental health and well-being, particularly among adults across the lifespan who lost control over valued goals early during the pandemic. These findings were recently published in Motivation and Emotion (2022). Jaron is now a Ph.D. student at NDSU.