Class of 2024
Austin Ashley worked with Dr. Latasha Holden to investigate stereotype threat and tokenism effects in testing situations. They also explored mindfulness interventions and their usefulness for marginalized communities in schools.
Kristina Howell joined the doctoral program in Social and Personality Psychology at the University of Illinois. While in the master’s program, she worked with Dr. Chris Fraley to study how moral transfer occurs in indirect parasocial relationships.
Hunter Meyers teaches psychology at the United States Military Academy at West Point. While at Illinois, he worked with Dr. Dan Newman to investigate leader influence and gender and with Dr. Leo Alexander to investigate the reasons for racial differences in the career preferences of ROTC cadets.
Maggie Palmiero joined the doctoral program in Social and Personality Psychology at the University of Illinois. While in the master’s program, she worked with Dr. Chris Fraley to study insecurity bias in retrospective reports of romantic attachment.
Yinuo Peng joined the doctoral program in Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience at Vanderbilt University. While at Illinois, she worked with Dr. Frances Wang, Dr. Derek Hoiem, and Dr. Diane Beck to study how learning sequence affects the category learning of humans and deep neural networks.
Ajith Senthil joined the Brain and Cognitive Sciences doctoral program at the University of Southern California. While at Illinois, he worked on several projects involving artificial intelligence. He worked with Dr. Chris Fraley to develop chatbots and chat transcript analysis methods to study attachment from conversation; and he worked independently to develop frameworks of personality and behavior informed by computational neuroscience.
Shuo Yan joined the doctoral program in clinical psychology at the University of Missouri at Columbia. While at Illinois, she worked with Dr. Howard Berenbaum to study adult emotions, depression, worry, autism, and schizotypy. She also worked with Dr. Karen Rudolph to investigate adolescent internalizing symptoms.
Yuji Yao joined the Laboratory for the Neural Mechanisms of Attention at the University of California, Davis as a research intern. While at Illinois, she worked with Dr. Frances Wang and Dr. Daniel Simons to study whether sadness and fear differentially affect mind wandering.
Chenhao Zhao joined the doctoral program in Counseling Psychology at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. While at Illinois, he worked with Dr. Carla Hunter to study the mental health disparities among Asian and Asian American college students using and intersectionality framework.
We are grateful to the Class of 2024 for their leadership in developing a psychology peer mentorship program to connect graduate and undergraduate students, and for their efforts to create a mentorship guide for graduate students.
Class of 2023
Tao Chen joined the doctoral program in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Illinois. While in the MSPS program, he worked with Drs. Monica Fabiani and Gabriele Gratton to study the neural correlates of visual awareness with optical imaging.
Samantha DeHart entered a doctoral program in clinical psychology. While at Illinois, she worked with Dr. Howard Berenbaum to explore relationships between pleasurable emotion, depression, and stress/deprivation. She also examined moral injury, PTSD, and depression in military servicemembers.
Le’Elle Davis pursued work in industry. While at Illinois, she worked with Dr. Carla Hunter to study the implementation and facilitation of a community-university collaborative educational curriculum called ASPIRE, which addresses educational inequity among minority students.
Yue Li joined the CoPE lab at Brandeis University as a research assistant. While at Illinois, she worked with Dr. Wendy Heller to explore the associations among internalizing symptoms, executive function, and stereotype threat susceptibility.
Apoorva Nag joined the doctoral program in Social Work at the University of Illinois. In the MSPS program, she worked with Dr. Nicole Allen to examine the ways that individuals interact with and are influenced by broader social and cultural climates, particularly as related to violence against womxn.
Dillion Quinones joined the Human Factors and Applied Cognition program at the University of South Dakota. While at Illinois, he worked with Drs. Diane Beck and Lili Sahakyan to conduct exploratory studies on probability as a factor of intentional forgetting in item-method directed forgetting.
Jazmyne Ross pursued her interests in data science and machine learning. While at Illinois, she worked with Dr. Frances Wang to study human-drone interaction, focusing on the critical aspects of drone construction and behavior for social engagement between humans and robots.
Jacob Ryder joined the National Center for Principled Leadership and Research Ethics as the Deputy Chief of Staff. While at Illinois, he worked with Dr. Diane Beck to study individual differences in visual perception through rapid scene detection tasks.
Ruoqian Wang joined a test company in China as an industrial-organizational psychology researcher. While at Illinois, she worked with Dr. Fritz Drasgow to investigate how personality traits affect truck drivers’ perception of job stress, job satisfaction, and turnover intention.
Chenwei Zhu pursued work in industry. While at Illinois, she worked with Dr. Dan Simons to study change detection associated with the perceived smoothness of film cuts.
Class of 2022
Kyle Baacke joined the doctoral program in Psychology/Neuroscience at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. While at Illinois, he studied with Professors Aron Barbey and Wendy Heller to investigate applications of an ensemble metareasoner and to improve decoding methods using fMRI data, respectively.
Anthony Greco joined the doctoral program in Industrial/Organizational Psychology at University of Minnesota. While at Illinois, he studied with Professor James Rounds to examine vocational interests and self-efficacy.
Hanxiong Guan joined the doctoral program in Marketing (Consumer Behavior track) at the University of Washington Foster School of Business. While at Illinois, he studied with Professors Dolores Albarracin and Chadly Stern to examine persuasion communications and political psychology.
Yilin (Elaine) Liu joined the doctoral program in Applied Developmental and Educational Psychology at Boston College. While at Illinois, she studied with Professor Eva Pomerantz to investigate the influence of parental homework involvement on children’s math achievement and math anxiety.
Linyuan (Carol) Shi worked with Professor Joshua Gulley to examine the effects of adolescent alcohol and THC co-use in rat models. She joined the doctoral program at the University of Illinois to continue her study of behavioral neuroscience.
Simran Suresh joined The Pavilion Foundation to work as a Crisis Intake Counselor. While at Illinois, she studied with Professor Chris Fraley to examine the social and personality development. She also worked with Drs. Kathryn Leskis and Crystal Newman at the Illinois Neurobehavioral Assessment Laboratory.
Chenli Wang joined the doctoral program in the Linguistics Department at Rutgers University. While at Illinois, she studied with Professor Cynthia Fisher to examine verb bias adaptation.
Yiwen Wang studied with Professors Alejandro Lleras and Simona Buetti to examine peripheral vision and parallel search. She joined the doctoral program at the University of Illinois to continue her study of attention and perception.
Yaqi Xu joined the doctoral program in psychology at University of California—Santa Cruz. While at Illinois, she studied with Professor Kara Federmeier to examine language comprehension and production.
Runhan (Brad) Yang studied the effects of self-pacing on perceptual tasks with Professor Aaron Benjamin. He joined the doctoral program at the University of Illinois to continue studying cognitive psychology.
Jingfeng (Craig) Zhang worked with Professor Jon Willits in the Learning and Language Laboratory to build a simulation of human learning behavior, using neural networks. He joined the doctoral program at the University of Illinois where he will continue his study of reinforcement learning and memory.
Class of 2021
Ilaria Amato joined Bold Insight, a user experience and human factors consulting practice. While at Illinois, she studied with Aron Barbey to examine the relation between aerobic fitness and decision making competence in young adults and explore what neural mechanisms drive that relationship.
Jae Wan Choi joined the doctoral program at Illinois where he continues to examine intra- and interpersonal factors including psychophysiological indices and family environments, and their relationship to youth psychopathology.
Chas Monge joined the doctoral program in Communication at The Ohio State University. While at Illinois, he studied with several professors including Professors Howard Berenbaum, Sean Laurent, and Chris Fraley to examine how emotions, psychological needs, and personality interface with how people reason and think about one another and their behaviors in online environments.
Katherine Haigler joined the Human Development and Family Studies doctoral program at Penn State. While completing her master’s at the University of Illinois, she worked with Dr. Heidemarie Laurent investigating the psychological and neural mechanisms of well-being around pregnancy and birth.
Jieming (Lois) Li studied with Professor Sean Laurent to examine the exacerbating effect of agent disgust on moral judgment and punishment.
Yuetian Vivian Li studied with Professor Sepideh Sadaghiani to examine the temporal structure and scale-free characteristics of emotion, and she studied with Professor Karen Rudolph to examine object perception and the relation between social goals and children's emotional responses towards social stressors. Next, she will join the Masters in Data Science Program at Brown University.
Menghan Luo studied with Professor Catharine Fairbairn to examine how people's emotions during social interactions affect their behavioral outcomes. After graduation, Menghan joined a research team at the Institute of Psychology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences where she studies facial expression and emotion.
Christine Salva joined the doctoral program at the University of Las Vegas, Nevada, Clinical Neuropsychology track. While at Illinois she studied with Professor Daniel Hyde to examine the relationships between symbolic number knowledge and approximate number comparison abilities in the preschool years. She also assisted Dr. Kathryn Leskis at the Illinois Neurobehavioral Assessment Laboratory.
Summer Wen Song studied with Professor Dolores Albarracin to examine the actor-observer asymmetry on the interpretation of passive-aggressive behaviors. Next, she will continue her work with Professor Albarracin at the University of Pennsylvania.
Yifan Catherine Yang studied with Professor Dan Simons to examine difference judgements in simultaneously and sequentially presented images. They also used eye-tracking to assess whether individuals who did and did not notice an unexpected object in an inattentional blindness task.
Class of 2020
Ling Lee Chong joined the doctoral program in the Attention and Perception program area at the University of Illinois where she is continuing her work with Professor Diane Beck to examine the similarities and differences between human vision and deep neural networks in solving object recognition problems.
Christopher Crawford joined the doctoral program at University of California, Berkeley in the Social-Personality Psychology program area. While at Illinois, he studied with Professors Benjamin Hankin and Howard Berenbaum to examine how aspects of an individual’s emotional experience—such as emotion regulation, beliefs about emotions, and emotional awareness—both develop and influence psychosocial adjustment across the lifespan.
Yadong Dai joined the doctoral program in Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Illinois where he will continue to study with Professor Jake Hinman to examine the neural electrophysiology of freely behaving animals.
Gabrielle Drong joined the doctoral program in Counseling at the University of Illinois. As a master’s student, she studied with Professor Chris Fraley to examine the relationship between attachment insecurity and the stress people experience following loss and with Professor Wendy Heller to examine the impact of virtual reality technology on mental health.
Siqi Feng joined the Interdisciplinary Graduate Programme at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. While at Illinois, she studied with several professors including Professor Chadly Stern to examine the association of social support, mental health discrimination, and self-harm among transgender individuals; Professor Dov Cohen to examine culture differences in the effect of essentialist beliefs on attitudes towards sexual minorities; and Professor Jon Willits to examine gender stereotypes in language use on media.
Grace Goodwin joined the doctoral program at University of Nevada, Las Vegas for Clinical Psychology (neuropsychology track). While at Illinois, she studied with Professors Wendy Heller, Karen Rudolph, and Aron Barbey to examine Individual differences in emotional, cognitive, and neural processing in neurotypical adolescents and adults as well as adults with mild traumatic brain injury. Grace was the recipient of the Master of Science in Psychological Science Achievement Award (2020).
Lydia Jiang joined the doctoral program at University of Toronto for Cognitive Neuroscience. While at Illinois, she studied with Professors Kara Federmeier and Lili Sahakyan to examine the interactions among emotion and memory and their neural underpinnings.
Rhyann Robinson joined the doctoral program in clinical psychology at University of Massachusetts, Boston for Clinical Psychology. While at Illinois, she studied with Carla Hunter to examine the protective and risk factors associated with psychological well-being and help-seeking behaviors among ethnic and racial minorities.
Wing Yan Sze is pursuing work in the industry. While at Illinois, she studied with Karen Rudolph to examine social sensitivity in youth and gender intensification in friendship values and with Professor Chris Fraley to examine dyadic effects of attachment and relationship functioning.
Danny Vushaj is pursuing an MSW at Loyola University of Chicago. While at Illinois, he studied with Professor Joseph Cohen to examine the differential effects of neglect on internalizing and externalizing distress.
John Yi is pursuing work in the industry. While at Illinois, he studied with Professor Brent Roberts to address the question: What about a person, in college, predicted whether they found a job that fit their values in middle age. He also examined whether experiencing a better fit with your job changes a person over time.
Jiahao (Lucas) Zong joined the Yangtze River Industry Fund in Hubei Wuhan as a Junior Fund Manager.
Class of 2019
Stephanie (Kern) Kane joined the doctoral program in Neuroscience at the University of Arkansas. While at Illinois, she collaborated with Drs. Heidemarie Laurent and Wendy Heller. Stephanie’s interest lies in investigating the neurocognitive bases of well-being and attentional control.
Jun-Yeob Kim joined the doctoral program in Industrial-Organizational Psychology at the University of Illinois where he is continuing his work with Dr. Dan Newman. His work focuses on personality and perceptions of leadership.
Abisola Smith works in several capacities as an advocate for racial minority youth and community health. While at Illinois, she collaborated with Dr. Helen Neville.
Naidan Tu joined the doctoral program in Industrial-Organizational Psychology at the University of South Florida. While at Illinois, she collaborated with Drs. Jim Rounds and Chris Napolitano. Naidan studies vocational interest, career aspirations, and career expectations.
Drew Weiner joined the doctoral program in Social Psychology at the University of Illinois where he is continuing his work with Dr. Sean Laurent. Drew’s research focuses on moral and social cognition with respect to perceptions of wealth.
Kathleen (Angie) Willoughby joined the doctoral program in Cognitive Neuroscience at Colorado State University. While at Illinois, she trained with Drs. Monica Fabiani, Gabrielle Gratton, and Wendy Heller. Angie is interested in aspects of cognitive aging and neurodegeneration.
Jing (Zoe) Xu joined the doctoral program in Attention and Perception at the University of Illinois where she is continuing her work with Drs. Simona Buetti and Alejandro Lleras. Her research focuses on visual search, working memory, and the influence of culture on time perception.
Pei-Ling Yang joined the doctoral program in Attention and Perception at the University of Illinois where she is continuing her work with Dr. Diane Beck. Pei-Ling’s work focuses on demonstrating and understanding the horizontal advantage of spatial attention.