Allison Dai, BA (she/her). Allison is a graduate student in the Personality, Individual Differences and Behavior Genetics program in the Psychology department, working primarily with Colin DeYoung. Allison graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology and a Bachelor of Science in Business in Supply Chain Operations and Management from the University of Minnesota in 2020. Her research interests include dynamic interactions between parenting, personality neuroscience as well as understanding psychopathology using neuroimaging.
Nathalie Dumornay, BS (she/her). Nathalie is a graduate student in the developmental psychopathology and clinical science program at the Institute of Child Development. She received a B.S. in Cognitive and Brain Science from Tufts University and worked as a Clinical Research Assistant in Dr. Kerry Ressler’s Neurobiology of Fear Lab at McLean Hospital prior to beginning graduate school. She is interested in understanding the effects of early life stress and adversity on brain and behavioral development as well as identifying mechanisms linking early life adversity to later psychopathology.
Kayla Nelson, BS (she/her). Kayla is a graduate student in the developmental psychopathology and clinical science program at the Institute of Child Development. She received her BS in Psychology from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and was the Project Coordinator in Dr. Ann Masten’s Project Competence Research on Risk and Resilience Lab at the Institute of Child Development prior to beginning her graduate program. Kayla is interested in understanding the role of risk and protective factors in the etiology and maintenance of psychopathology, with a focus on how lifetime experiences and early parenting behaviors affect adolescent well-being.
Emily Padrutt, BS (she/her). Emily is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow in the developmental psychopathology and clinical science program at the Institute of Child Development. She received a BA in Psychology and Spanish from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and worked as a research coordinator in Dr. Michèle Mazzocco’s Math and Numeracy Lab at the Institute of Child Development prior to beginning graduate school. She is interested in understanding pathways of risk in the intergenerational transmission of depression, with a focus on the development of self- and emotion-regulation in infancy and early childhood.
Felix Pichardo, BA (he/him). Felix is a graduate student in the developmental science program at the Institute of Child Development. Previously, he was a Neurohealth Technician at the Minnesota Center for Twin and Family Research where he worked on collecting biological samples, EEG, and MRI data. He also helped to process EEG and MRI data for analysis. He completed his undergraduate at the State University of New York at Purchase College. His research interests include data science applications for psychological research, cognitive development, moral reasoning, computational methods in psychology research, and the resilience of these systems to drug and alcohol abuse.
Jaylen (Jay) Santos (he/him) is a graduate student in the developmental science program at the Institute of Child Development. He received his Bachelor of Science from Southern Oregon University in both psychology and criminology. Jay was a research assistant at the Center for Critical Public Health working on qualitative inquiries regarding rural young adult alcohol and tobacco use. Jay’s primary research interest is looking at the intersection between juvenile delinquency and resilience, and how treatment programs could be formulated around protective factors to reduce recidivism.
Akira Wang, MPH (she/they). Akira is a graduate student in the developmental psychopathology and clinical science program at the Institute of Child Development. She received a MPH in from Emory University and worked as a Research Coordinator at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center prior to beginning graduate school. She is interested in understanding the biopsychosocial consequences of early life stress in children, with an emphasis on parental characteristics. She is interested in using data-driven approaches and behavioral genetics to study how stress alters the normative trajectory of brain development, leveraging neuroimaging techniques to identify prodromal indicators of psychopathology.