Name: Jamilia Blake, PhD
School: Texas A&M University
Contact Information: jjblake@tamu.edu; (979) 862-8341

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
Dr. Blake is an Assistant Professor in School Psychology program in the Department of Educational Psychology at Texas A&M University. Dr. Blake is the Director of the Peer Relations and Adjustment Lab . Dr. Blake earned her doctoral degree at the University of Georgia in School Psychology. She is a Licensed Specialist in School Psychology (LSSP) and is certified in School Crisis Response. Her research interests surround children's peer relations. Specifically, she is interested in peer-directed aggression in ethnic minority populations and females, and the relation between peer-directed aggression and children's psychological/ social adjustment, and academic achievement. In addition to exploring aggression in youth, Dr. Blake's research interests also include familial risk and protective factors that either promote or discourage children’s engagement in aggression. For more information about Dr. Blake's current research projects, please visit: pralab.tamu.edu .

Name: A. Nayena Blankson, PhD
School: Spelman College (GA)
Contact Information: ablanks1@spelman.edu

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
My research interests straddle both developmental and quantitative psychology. My substantive research interests include the organization and development of cognitive abilities as it relates to personality, parenting, and academic achievement. I am also interested in the use of quantitatively sophisticated methods to address substantive research questions. My quantitative interests include measurement invariance and structural equation modeling. My current research project is aimed at investigating the associations among fluid and crystallized intelligence, executive functions, and temperament in a sample of 4-year-olds. Previous studies with undergraduates include examination of the link between executive functioning and the trajectory of hyperactivity over time and examination of the associations between early social-emotional functioning and academic achievement in the prediction of later academic achievement. For more information see: http://catlab.weebly.com

Name: Stephanie Carlson, PhD
School:Carlson Child Development Lab (MN)
Contact Information: smc@umn.edu

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
Dr. Stephanie M. Carlson is Associate Professor in the Institute of Child Development and the Center for Neurobehavioral Development, University of Minnesota. She received her BA from Bucknell University in Pennsylvania (where she was a student leader of Psi Chi) and PhD from the University of Oregon (Eugene), and was previously a professor at the University of Washington (Seattle). Her research focuses on the development of executive function (cognitive skills involved in self-control), theory of mind, and pretend play in early childhood using behavioral, brain, and cross-cultural studies (mostly in Asia). In current grant-funded projects, Dr. Carlson, together with her students and collaborators, is developing measures of executive function for preschool children and investigating the factors (such as play, parenting, and direct training) that can help promote the healthy development of executive function skills in all children, including those in very disadvantaged circumstances and children with autism. Dr. Carlson is a Fellow of both the American Psychological Association (Div. 7) and the Association for Psychological Science, is Vice President of the Jean Piaget Society, and serves on several editorial boards. She would like to add that Minnesota is wonderful in the summer! See our lab website for more: http://www.cehd.umn.edu/icd/Carlson.

Name: Danielle Horvath Dallaire, PhD
School: The College of William & Mary (VA)
Contact Information: dallaire@wm.edu; (757) 221-3884

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
Danielle Horvath Dallaire is an assistant professor at The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, VA. After receiving her PhD in Developmental Psychology from Temple University (2003) she completed post-doctorate training in developmental psychopathology at Vanderbilt University. Since coming to William & Mary in 2006 she has actively researched how children cope with a parent’s incarceration. She approaches the study of this issue from an attachment framework and is currently examining protective factors in this population which may help foster resiliency in these children. In addition she is evaluating children’s reactions to visitation and remote forms of contact with their incarcerated parent.

Recent, relevant publications include:

Poehlmann, J., Dallaire, D.H., Loper, A.B., & Shear, L. (2010). Children’s contact with their incarcerated parents: Research findings and recommendations. American Psychologist, 65, 575-598.

Dallaire, D.H., Ciccone, A., & Wilson, L. (2010). Teachers’ experiences with and expectations of children with incarcerated parents. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 31, 281 – 290.

Dallaire, D.H. & Wilson. L. (2010). The Impact of Exposure to Parental Criminal Activity, Arrest, and Sentencing on Children’s Academic Competence and Externalizing Behavior. Journal of Child and Family Studies 19, 404–418.

Name: Andres De Los Reyes, PhD
School:University of Maryland at College Park (MD)
Contact Information: adlr@umd.edu; (301) 405-7049

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
Dr. De Los Reyes received his PhD in 2008 from Yale University and completed clinical internship training at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research program incorporates clinical, social, developmental, and cognitive psychology areas to understand why different informants’ reports of children’s behavior yield discrepant research conclusions. The goals of his research are to understand how these informant discrepancies influence the identification of effective treatments, and whether they can ultimately be used to understand how children’s behavior varies across contexts, develops over time, and changes over the course of treatment. Current projects include: (1) testing comprehensive methods of assessing parent-adolescent conflict and (2) testing new assessment strategies for incorporating biological, behavioral, and clinical rating measures of adolescent social anxiety.

Name: Faraz Farzin, PhD
School: Stanford University
Contact Information: ffarzin@stanford.edu

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
My primary research goal is to study the development of visual processing during infancy. Vision is one of the most complex and remarkable functions of the human brain, and is particularly important during infancy as it provides a means for infants to interact with and learn from their environment before motor control has fully developed. Because our visual world is highly dynamic--scenes are constantly changing and our eyes are constantly moving--the visual system is faced with the demands of precisely integrating information across time in order to form a seamless percept. I am currently funded by the National Eye Institute to work on a project that uses EEG (electroencephalography) and behavioral looking-time techniques to examine how temporal visual processing develops during infancy.

Name: Simone V. Gill, PhD
School:Boston University (MA)
Contact Information: simvgill@bu.edu; (617) 353-7513

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
My interests are in the areas of development and motor adaptation. I aim to understand how types of practice and motor experience affect motor adaptation over the lifespan. My focus is on capturing the trajectory of developmental change over multiple, nested time scales: across sessions, within sessions, within trials, and in the transition from trial to trial. In my current work, I have used walking to examine how infants and adults modify their gait to cope with changes in the environment and with changes in their body dimensions.

Name: George W. Holden, PhD
School: Southern Methodist University (TX)
Contact Information: gholden@smu.edu; 214-768-4696

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
As a social developmental psychologist, my research efforts have been directed at better understanding the determinants of parenting and its effects on children’s development. Much of my previous work has been focused on parental social cognition. Currently we are engaged in several studies examining negative emotion in the family and how it affects youth. For example, in one study we are having mothers make audio recording of their home interactions with their children during stressful times. A second study examines how prior experiences with negative emotion affect students’ physiological reactions. Another issue we are investigating involves parental guidance of children’s developmental trajectory with regard to education and spiritual development. More information and recent publications can be found at: http://smu.edu/psychology/html/people/holden.html

Name: Alice Sterling Honig, PhD
School:Syracuse University (NY)
Contact Information: ahonig@syr.edu; (315) 343-4296

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
1. Language development in young children and parents and caregivers' interactions that support this development
2. Prosocial and moral development and how to recognize and deal with bullying behaviors
3. Cross cultural study of family child rearing practices
4. Infant and toddler development , including temperament and attachment
5. Observation and assessment skills in developing insights into child behavior and how to nurture positive growth and development
6. Therapeutic techniques to use with children with impulse control and aggressive behaviors Nurturing intellectual passions in children
7. Working with families in divorce /custody battles in order to optimize children's adaptation
8. Stress in children's lives: how to recognize it; how to ameliorate it
9. Bilingualism: How to encourage multiple language learning
10. Music in children's lives, including lullabies, narrative folk songs and songs that include movement
11. Marital patterns that can increase child worries and how to help couples learn more positive techniques in interactions
12. Men in caregiving roles

Name: Jessica S. Horst, PhD
School:University of Sussex (UK)
Contact Information: jessica@sussex.ac.uk (email preferred); +44(0)1273 873084

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
I am interested in young children’s early cognitive development. Most of my research focuses on how 2-3-year-old children learn their first few hundred words, which are predominantly nouns (names for things). These studies focus on both learning nouns and learning object categories (e.g., balls, dogs, trucks). In the lab, we use a variety of methods to learn more about what children know about words and categories and how children determine what a new word means. By studying both how children initially determine what a word means and how they build a memory for what a word means, we can gain real insight into how children acquire language. You can also visit the lab’s website at http://www.lifesci.sussex.ac.uk/research/wordlab/index.html

Name: Stuart Marcovitch, PhD
School:University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Contact Information: s_marcov@uncg.edu

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
My research focuses on how we learn to control our actions, and how these consciously controlled behavior contribute to higher order thinking. To study this phenomenon, I typically assess children in the first 7 years of life on a variety of cognitive and social measures. Of particular interest is the development of higher order thinking skills, including the growth of executive processes that underlie inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Current lab research includes investigating the mitigating roles of language development, emotional understanding, and context. In addition, a number of my studies also involve psychophysiological measures (EEG; heart rate monitors) of self-regulation. You can also visit the lab’s website at http://www.uncg.edu/~s_marcov/index.html

Name: Ageliki Nicolopoulou, PhD
School: Lehigh University (PA)
Contact Information: agn3@lehigh.edu; (610) 758-5073

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
I am a developmental psychologist who studies young children's narrative activities and their role in development. Specifically, I study both narrative development per se (the development of narrative competence and sophistication) and the role of narrative in the overall process of development, including cognitive, socio-emotional, and personality development (through the formation of peer-group culture). We are currently developing a bookreading program to promote young children’s narrative comprehension. For this project, we’re systematically analyzing the complexity and sophistication of a large array of children’s commercially available books. We’re also systematically analyzing the types of inferences young children make when they hear a story read to them (e.g., factual info vs. physical or psychological motives). For more info see: http://www.lehigh.edu/~inpsy/nicolopoulou.html

Name: Adriana J. Umaña-Taylor, PhD
School:Arizona State University
Contact Information: Adriana.Umana-Taylor@asu.edu

Sponsor’s Research Interests:
Dr. Umaña-Taylor is Principal Investigator of the Supporting MAMI (Mexican-origin Adolescent Mothers and Infants) Project, which is a longitudinal study following 200 Mexican-origin adolescent mothers, their mother figures, and their infants. The broader study is designed to examine risk and resilience in the lives of adolescent mothers and their young children. A central goal of the project is to explore how various aspects of cultural orientation (e.g., ethnic identity, acculturation) moderate and mediate the connections between risk factors and adolescent mothers' well being.