People
Canan Karatekin is an associate professor at the Institute of Child Development. She has a BA in Psychology from Harvard College, and a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from UCLA. She studied cognitive impairments in children with youth-onset psychosis and ADHD for many years. However, in 5/2011, she decided to shift her research focus to the child welfare system and later broadened her area to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). In recent years, she has broadened her interests even more, to social and structural determinants of health and health inequities as they are related to ACEs and other dimensions of children's wellbeing.
Graduate Students
Rachel Kritzik is a fifth-year Developmental Psychopathology and Clinical Science student at the Institute of Child Development. Her research interests generally concern how policies and structures affect child health and wellbeing within a social determinants of health framework. Her interests span understanding the long term effects of early childhood education, supporting children involved in the child welfare system, and preventing child firearm mortality.
Serena Mani is a first-year PhD student in Developmental Psychopathology and Clinical Science. Her primary research interests involve upstream public health determinants (e.g., economic and health policies, systemic resourcing, institutional design) and their impact on parental and child brain health. She hopes to explore how power is exercised (deliberately or negligently) through fragmented, opaque systems to shape families' access to mental health care, and to use public health and data science methods to uncover structural drivers of child development.
Other Research Assistants
Anna Steans is a fourth year undergraduate student completing a BS in Psychology with a Minor in Integrative Neuroscience. She has been driven by environmental components impacting mental wellbeing and neurological disorders. Anna's future research interests include policies surrounding climate change and historical redlining impacts on child safety and wellbeing.
Contessa Destefanis is a fourth year undergraduate student completing a BS in Psychology at the University of Minnesota. She is especially interested in child and adolescent mental health and understanding how children’s environments and experiences influence their development and wellbeing. Contessa’s future interests include counseling psychology, child development, and research focused on improving mental health and support for children and families.
Tingyun (Tingting) Wang is a high school student at Mounds View High School and a PSEO student at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include prenatal and early childhood environmental chemical exposures, and their impact on development and neurological disorders. Tingting hopes to understand how various agencies and policies regulate children's chemical exposure levels, and how they differ across different demographic or geographic areas.
Maya Fteiha is a fourth-year undergraduate student pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Psychology, with minors in Integrative Neuroscience and Developmental Psychology. Her academic pursuits emphasize the intersection of neuroscience and neuropsychology, particularly exploring how neurodevelopmental processes in children influence cognitive functioning, learning mechanisms, behavioral responses, and emotional regulation. Maya's future research and clinical endeavors are oriented towards identifying innovative therapeutic interventions aimed at supporting children who experience traumatic events, as well as providing comprehensive assistance to their families.
Rosa Gerdts (she/her/ella) is a first-year student in the School Psychology (MA+EdS) program at the University of Minnesota. She earned her BA from Pomona College and subsequently worked as a Research Coordinator at Hennepin Healthcare Research Institute, where she conducted behavioral health research with diverse clinical populations. Her research interests center on self-regulation and emotion regulation, particularly how these processes interact with sociocultural and structural contexts to shape children's and adolescents' mental health and educational outcomes. She is especially interested in supporting wellbeing among historically underserved youth, with a focus on systemic and upstream mechanisms; she also has interest in community-based participatory approaches to this work.
Others in the Research Group
Other undergraduates in the research group include Maggie Plante,Talal Ahmed, and Izabel Honerman. Samantha Daddi, a post-bac who graduated from the University of Minnesota, has been volunteering for 2 years. Unnati Khanna and Shruti Chakraborty, both of whom have recently early MA degrees, join us from India every week. Nilufer Kuru, a faculty member at Siirt University in Turkey, will be joining our meetings from Turkey. We also have long-standing collaborations with Dr. Susan Mason in the School of Public Health and Dr. Andrew Barnes in Pediatrics. We are also collaborating with Angela Fertig at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs on a study of the passage of the Child Tax Credit in Minnesota in 2023.