Biography
I am a first year student in the Clinical/Community program. I'm about as fully Illinoisan as one can be. I was born in Hinsdale, IL and grew up in Naperville before attending undergrad at Northern Illinois University. There, I graduated with degrees in secondary social studies education and psychology. I briefly worked as a high school teacher before switching careers into doing research in clinical neuroscience. After teaching, I worked under Dr. Laurie Wakschlag in the Developmental Mechanisms lab at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine in downtown Chicago before finally settling here in Urbana-Champaign for graduate school.
Research Interests
I am primarily interested in the conceptualization and etiology of psychopathology--in particular internalizing disorders such as depression and anxiety. More narrowly, I am interested in examining transdiagnostic mechanisms of these disorders through the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework utilizing neuroimaging, computational tools, and measures of cognition. I utilize classification and unsupervised methods for examining neural mechanisms of cognition as well as psychopathology. Recently, I have utilized deep learning (i.e., convolutional) networks for brain age classification.
Education
Northern Illinois University - Double Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and History (with Teaching Certification)
Additional Campus Affiliations
National Institutes of Health - National Institute of Mental Health - Graduate Student (2020-present)
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine - Research Assistant (2017-2019)