Our Team
Our Team
Principal Investigator
Katherine Meltzoff, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Special Education in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Riverside. She completed her Postdoctoral work at the Yale Child Study Center, and received her PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Meltzoff (formerly Stavropoulos) conducts translational studies to explore the reward system in ASD, as well as how anxiety contributes to social deficits in ASD. She plans to investigate school-based interventions for children with ASD, and how those interventions affect neural activity, behavior, and school performance. She is a licensed clinical psychologist and is the Director of the the UCR SEARCH Center.
Graduate Students
Cameron Alexander, B.S., is a doctoral student in the School Psychology program at the University of California, Riverside. He holds a B.S. in Human Development, with minors in Education and Psychology, from the University of California, Davis. Prior to joining UCR, Cameron served as a research coordinator and lab manager for an Institute of Education Sciences grant at the UC Davis School of Education and MIND Institute Collaborative Autism Research in Education (CARE) Lab. His research interests include utilizing biomarkers and neurological activity as tools for the early detection of autism in young children. He is also interested in the use of biomarkers to better understand and measure emotion regulation in children with varying neurodevelopmental disabilities.
Sarah Touati is a doctoral student in the School Psychology program at the University of California, Riverside. She holds a B.S. in Psychology and a minor in education. Sarah is currently working as a Behavior Interventionist and practicing Applied Behavior Analysis Therapy and was a teacher assistant for a kindergarten Special Education class when she was a senior in high school. Her research interests are in the development of anxiety in children with and without ASD which led her to join the SCDN lab as a research assistant in her third year. Sarah is passionate about educating herself and others about the importance of diversity and awareness of different mental disabilities and disorders.
Undergraduate Research Assistants
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Lab Alumni
Dr. Tricia Choy
Dr. Elizabeth Baker
Jordan Dagan- M.A. at UCR Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Program
Jasmine Banh
Mithila Mahale
Vivian Li
Giselle Colmenares
Johanna Diaz
Thaniya Shankar
Mallory Scott
Tolou Safari