Yiling Yun
Hi! My name is Yiling Yun. I am a second-year PhD student in the UCLA Psychology Department, specializing in computational cognition. I have a background in Statistics and Cognitive Science with a Specialization in Computing. I am interested in how people socialize with others and how people pick up subtle cues in communication. I have research project experiences in social perception, multimodal alignment, and indirect communication. I am very interested in exploring topics that relate to human social intelligence. For example, what makes us so creative in arts and literature? Why can we naturally pick up subtlety in language? How do we navigate through complicated social relations? If you are interested in these topics, I hope to read literature, design experiments, and/or explore recent technologies with you to contribute to cutting-edge research!
Stephanie Dolbier
Stephanie is a fifth-year PhD student in the Social Psychology program at UCLA. She is interested in how people communicate with those they disagree with, and what can be done to increase the effectiveness of these dialogues. Conversations about controversial topics commonly devolve into unproductive messes, leaving both sides feeling like the other is stupid, immoral, or ignorant. Stephanie is interested in finding ways to improve the quality of discourse around heated topics and encouraging people to have those difficult conversations - if only to better understand what goes through their opponents’ minds. Currently, her research is focused on developing interventions to help people become more open-minded, avoid cognitive biases, and stay level-headed when talking about emotionally charged political issues. She is also broadly interested in topics such as how social media affects how we interact with people we disagree with, how the dynamics between online or text-based conversations may differ from face-to-face in-person ones, and how people can develop greater patience for frustrating interactions and events.
Andrew Lee
My name is Andrew -- I'm a second-year PhD student at UCLA studying computational cognition. I attended Williams College for my bachelor's in cognitive science and at Oxford University for a year where I studied philosophy and statistics. My interests lie at the intersection of cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. I study questions such as "What makes humans reason so flexibly in a way that chatGPT cannot? How do we acquire representations of tasks/concepts that allow us to generalize to unseen but similar tasks? How do we build computational models inspired by deep learning that make use of the processes we uncover from human cognition?" A central idea in my research is that intelligent behavior on a task requires mentally representing and reasoning with, not only objects and their features, but the relations between objects (sameness, difference, category-of). This capacity allows us to ignore the superficial qualities of a task and focus on properties that facilitate generalization, yet most deep learning systems today have not explicitly incorporated these relational capabilities. My work seeks to address this gap in two ways: by studying how we form relational representations with psychological experiments and by building deep learning systems that, like humans, explicitly represent objects and the relations between them.
Robin Blades
I am interested in how chronic stress impacts health outcomes, particularly through inflammatory pathways. My current projects leverage neuroimaging to examine how threat and reward activity in the brain are linked to downstream inflammation. They also examine mind-body interventions, such as mindfulness meditation and savoring, that may promote resilience."
Clare McCann
I graduated from the University of Oregon in 2020 with a degree in Psychology with honors and minors in Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies and Special Education. I started my Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology with a minor in Quantitative Psychology in the fall of 2022 at UCLA, working with Dr. Jennifer Silvers (https://silverslab.psych.ucla.edu/research). My research focuses on exploring potential environmental (e.g., adversity) and biological factors (e.g., pubertal processes) contributing to individual differences in developmental outcomes (e.g., structural brain development, well-being) with translational applications. I aim to support the development of self, purpose, and motivation in underserved youth and young adults. In my free time, I volunteer with the To Be Honest campaign, try to enjoy running, knit, and hang out with my cats, Edgar and Orwell.
Lucy Cui
Lucy Cui is a faculty member at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY. She received her PhD in Cognitive Psychology from UCLA. She has industry experience working at Amazon on User Experience Research. She has ongoing research projects at UCLA and RPI on topics in the intersection of perception, cognition and education. She is broadly interested in how people reason, estimate and make decisions based on numbers, prices, graphs, and visual information in everyday contexts, such as games, shopping, and education. Potential research questions for a literature review include: How do people decide which product to purchase? What information are they considering or ignoring? What makes a good product? In what ways can graphs or data be deceiving? In what areas of life are numeracy skills important for? How do people perceive time and what alters their time perception? What distinguishes gamers from non-gamers? What do students struggle most with and how do we help them? Potential research opportunities include projects on: numerical processing, graph perception, user experience, expertise from games, pedagogical research (teaching and learning), and neurodivergence (ADHD and autism).
Leah Cha
Leah is a second year PhD student in the Health Psychology program at UCLA. Her research focuses on identifying the biological and psychological mechanisms of early life adversity and trauma exposure associated with chronic disease risk. Her research incorporates behavioral, genetic, and physiological assessments to capture these processes across multiple systems.
Sarah Alonzi
Sarah is a third-year doctoral student at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), pursuing her Ph.D. in Psychology with a focus on Health Psychology and a minor in Quantitative Psychology. Her research interests encompass a wide range of areas, including identifying psychological factors influencing treatment adherence and healthcare utilization, refining study design and methodology, and enhancing the experiences of patients and caregivers in end-of-life cancer care. These interests were shaped by her prior work, which included efforts to reduce misperceptions of palliative care for cancer patients in the Deep South, conducting meta-analyses to understand the impact of novel therapies on health-related quality of life in food allergy patients and families, and developing COVID-specific measures during the pandemic. Sarah is also dedicated to mentoring students interested in psychology, statistics, public health, and medicine, offering guidance on projects involving secondary data, aggregated social media data, original quantitative or qualitative data collection, and systematic literature reviews. Outside of her academic pursuits, she enjoys hiking, SCUBA diving, and going to music festivals. You can find a complete list of Sarah's research publications on her Google Scholar profile (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=tW3jc1IAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao).
Maria Naclerio
Maria is a first year Ph.D. student in Social Psychology/Affective Neuroscience at UCLA. She is interested in social connection, prosocial behavior, and self-transcendent emotions such as awe. She is currently investigating the effects of prosocial behavior and self-kindness on well-being. In her free time, Maria loves doing anything outside, including running, climbing, camping, and learning to surf.
Tyrone Sgambati
Tyrone Sgambati is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Psychology. His primary lines of research are conducted through the Relationships and Social Cognition Lab, where he focuses on a better understanding of political polarization and how to mitigate it. Right now, he has projects on intellectual humility and misperceptions of partisan moral values. He is also a member of the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab, where he is studying the emotion-profile and transformative nature of psychedelic substances. Prior to coming to Cal, he obtained his Bachelor of Science from the University of Michigan in 2019 with concentrations in philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science.
Grace Miao
As a PhD student at UCLA's Communication Department, Grace Miao stands at the forefront of exploring the intricate dynamics of interpersonal communication and social neuroscience. With a fervent passion for understanding how social interactions shape every facet of human existence, Grace employs a multidisciplinary approach to delve into the complexities of daily conversations and social exchanges. How do people 'vibe' with each other? What’s the science behind 'feeling the vibe' with a stranger? Using a data-driven approach to answer these questions, Grace examines the cognitive process of how people integrate information from multiple sensory modalities (audio, facial expressions, gestures), process them in their brain (neural activities), and form connections in day-to-day social interactions. To unpack the secrets behind conversations and vibes, Grace has collected an arsenal of research tools: in-depth transcription of daily interactions using Conversation Analysis, cutting-edge artificial intelligence algorithms for facial expression and body language analysis, and advanced portable neuroimaging techniques for brain signals. These methods collectively capture nuanced human responses during interactions (verbal/facial/neural), offering opportunities to discover groundbreaking insights into social communication. Beyond her research, Grace is an experienced mentor, guiding high school and college students through the intricacies of social science research. Her mentorship has enabled students to explore a wide array of topics across media psychology, linguistics and philosophy, education, and human-centered care. In the realm of media psychology, Grace's past students have explored the impact of extreme emotions expressed on social media, the influence of social media on the identity cognition of sexual minorities, fan reactions on social media, and the analysis of classical music's influence on high school students, alongside film analysis focusing on religious, cultural, and feminist social issues. In the realm of linguistics and philosophy, Grace's past mentees have investigated values in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks, conducted sociolinguistic analyses of African American Vernacular English, and examined the impact of media framing on political issues, as well as how translation has been used as a tool in colonization. In the realm of education, her mentees have tackled issues like the effectiveness of laptops in classrooms, the implementation of differentiated learning communities, and strategies for instructors to provide effective scaffolding to motivate students. In the realm of human-centered care, Grace's students have looked into the caregiving aspects for older adults with dementia, from healthcare policy analysis to caregiver-older adult interaction analysis. Interested in Grace’s work? Let’s schedule a meeting to chat!
Victoria Vezaldenos
Victoria Vezaldenos is a PhD student in the Combined Program in Education and Psychology at the University of Michigan where she also earned her M.A. in Education Studies and M.S. in Psychology. She received her bachelor's degree in Psychology with a minor in Education studies at UCLA and was recently awarded the prestigious Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship for her academic success and research agenda. Victoria's work specifically explores how multiracial young people come to understand race, racism, and racial identity and how it applies to their own lives. As a graduate student Victoria has also done research exploring ethnic-racial identity development in monoracial populations, how youth develop a critical consciousness, how schools can adapt social-emotional learning practices to support youth of color, and how parents can socialize their children toward antiracism. Victoria has extensive experience mentoring students at various levels of study and is interested in working with up-and-coming scholars that want to learn more about psychology and ethnic-racial identity development.
Jacob Prince
My name is Jacob Prince, and I am a 3rd-year PhD student in the Psychology Department at Harvard, doing research in the Vision Sciences Lab. In college I explored a wide range of classes before discovering the field of Cognitive Science, which examines how the brain gives rise to our mental experiences and behavior. Since then, I have done research at the intersection of neuroscience and AI, studying whether AI systems can help us understand how the brain transforms the rich content of our world into the neural firing patterns that support the behaviors we effortlessly perform each day - from object and facial recognition, to navigation, to reading and writing. This research involves measuring people's brains directly using non-invasive MRI scans, and having them perform behavioral experiments that measure how they perceive the world. Outside the lab, I am a passionate musician and sports fan, and I enjoy traveling into nature for camping and backpacking trips. I would be excited to work with students interested in AI, neuroscience, psychology, vision, music, or any combination of the above! My website is: https://jacob-prince.github.io/
Keion Harris
Keion is a first-year Joint Ph.D student in Social Work and Developmental Psychology at the University of Michigan. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from U-M in April 2023. Keion has an interest in health and educational outcomes of adolescent minority youth, followed by the implications of research on health and social policy. He works under the mentorship of Dr. Daphne C. Watkins for the Young Black Men, Masculinities and Mental Health (YBMen) Project in the School of Social Work and Dr. Kevin Cokley in the Research on Race, Achievement, Culture and Education (RACE) Lab in the Department of Psychology.
Yalda Daryani
My name is Yalda Daryani. I am a first-year Ph.D. student in social psychology at USC. I work as a research assistant at the Morality and Language (MOLA) Lab. I'm curious about how certain moral values might motivate extreme behavior and violence. So far, I've investigated which moral beliefs are associated with opinions toward honor killing and abortion. I'm curious about how cultural factors, moral beliefs, and ideology interact to form our attitudes and behaviors. More specifically, I want to learn how people from various cultural backgrounds morally justify acts of violence; how religious doctrines influence moral decisions that lead to extreme behavior; and how intersecting cultural, moral, and ideological frameworks influence the justification and perpetration of extreme behaviors, such as honor-related violence and polarization of views on controversial political topics. In addition to conducting research, I serve as a teaching assistant at USC, and this semester I am teaching a class of undergraduate students how to develop research ideas and how to elaborate on various areas of their research question in order to create a paper. Prior to coming to USC, I worked as a high school teacher, advising students on how to select and perform appropriate statistical analysis for their research questions in the psychology course. If you are interested in morality, extreme social behaviors, ideology, and social cognition, let's do research together!