Current CBD Trainees

CBD pre-doctoral students

Basirat O. Alabi (Psychology) is studying the social development of children of immigrants, ethnic minority and immigrant children.

Faculty mentors: Christia Brown, and Rashmita Mistry.

Background: Received BS in Psychology and Economics from the University of Alabama.

Oscar A. Baldelomar (Psychology) is interested in the interplay of culture and identity development. He is currently working on the application of cultural consensus analysis, a qualitative-quantitative technique, to the study of group identity content across different cultural settings. His most recent project on this topic involved Bribri Indian, Black, and Mestizo adolescents from different regions in Costa Rica.

Background: Received B.A. in psychology, philosophy, and M.A. in psychology, from the California State University Los Angeles.

Mari Davies (Psychology) is studying the neural and behavioral correlates of nonverbal communication and social understanding in high-functioning children with autism.

Faculty mentors: Marian Sigman, Patricia Greenfield

Background: Received BA in Psychology from the University of Chicago.

David Frederick (Psychology) is finishing a series of six studies that combine to form an investigation of the cross-cultural variation, evolutionary underpinnings, and influence of hormones on women’s preferences for different male body types.

Faculty mentors: Martie Haselton, Clark Barrett

Background: Received BA from Beloit College, Department of Psychology

Juana Gatson (Psychology) Is exploring how cultural relevancy within classroom contexts impacts children's identity development, academic outcomes and perceptions of racism and discrimination. She is currently focused on exploring the efficacy of culturally relevant learning paradigms in promoting resiliency and academic success among students of color .

Faculty mentors: Christia S. Brown, Tyrone Howard

Background: Received BA in Psychology and a minor in African American Studies from the University of Pennsylvania

Matthew Gervais (Bio Anthropology) is interested in the neuroevolutionary foundations of norm internalization, and in how internalization creates psychological biases that feed back on cultural evolutionary processes.

Faculty mentors: Dan Fessler, Patricia Greenfield

Background: Received a B.S. in Neuroscience and Anthropology from Binghamton University.

Amy Hubbard (Applied Linguistics) is studying the neural underpinnings of multisensory integration involved in human communication. Under the guidance of Dr. Mirella Dapretto in the UCLA Brain Mapping Center and John Schumann in Applied Linguistics, she is using functional MRI to investigate neural responses correlated with prosodically-coordinated gesture in first and second-language speakers of English.

Faculty mentors: John Schumann, Mirella Dapretto

Background: Received MA from The Pennsylvania State University, Department of Teaching English as a Second Language.

Virginia Huynh (Psychology) is interested in understanding social and cultural factors, such as educational contexts and parent-child relationships, that influence the development and academic adjustment of ethnic minority students.

Faculty mentors: Andrew Fuligni and Rashmita Mistry.

Background: Received BA in Psychology from Loyola Marymount University.

Adriana Manago (Psychology) is interested in combining developmental psychology and cultural anthropology to investigate gender identity development, gender socialization, and cultural constructions of gender.

Faculty mentors: Patricia Greenfield, Tom Weisner

Background: Received a B.S. in Journalism at West Virginia University and an M.A. in Experimental Psychology from San Jose State University.

Alethea Marti (Linguistic Anthropology) received her BA in Cognitive Science from UC Berkeley, specializing in Computational Modeling, and minoring in Anthropology. She is interested in combining the anthropological study of narrative with psychological and linguistic research in order to understand how children and, especially, adolescents are trained into culturally appropriate social roles and responsibilities. She spent the past summer in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, learning Tzotzil, a Mayan language, and beginning her MA fieldwork among the Zinacanteco community.

Faculty mentors: Dr Elinor Ochs, Patricia Greenfield

Kristin McNealy (Neuroscience) is studying the role of developmental, social, and cultural variables in shaping the neural structures subserving language learning. She is a graduate student in the Interdepartmental Neuroscience PhD program and she works with Dr. Mirella Dapretto in the UCLA Brain Mapping Center, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG). She plans to focus on the neural substrates of language learning and cognition and how they change across time from childhood through adolescence.

Faculty mentors: Mirella Dapretto, Cathy Sandhofer

Background: Received BS from Duke University, Department of Psychology

Special Note: Kristin McNealy has received an NSF graduate research fellowship for the next 3 years.

Elizabeth Reynolds (Neuroscience) spent the last year at UC Davis using functional MRI to compare language function of people with Down syndrome, Fragile X syndrome and typically developing participants. Liz's current research interests lie in the field of human social neuroscience. As a student in the Neuroscience IDP and a trainee in the Center for Culture, Brain and Development, she hopes utilize her background in functional neuroimaging and anthropology to explore how cultural experience effects basic cognitive processes.

Faculty mentors: Mirella Dapretto

Background: Received a B.S.c in Anthropology and Neuroscience from Emory University.

Lotte Thomsen (Psychology) is studying how different cultural practices in interpersonal relations shape psychological processes (such as self-enhancement and self-perception) and researching the role this plays for the experience and integration of Danish immigrant children and youth.

Faculty mentors: Patricia Greenfield, Alan Fiske

Background: Received MA in Clinical Psychology from University of Copenhagen, Denmark, Department of Psychology

Jennifer Vu (Graduate School of Education & Information Studies) will be looking at social outcomes in children who have suffered from traumatic brain injury, in particular focusing on friendship formation and mainenance. Also, I will look at parental/familial response to this injury and examine how they perceive this problem as well as how they respond, taking into consideration cultural differences of perception and negotiation.

Faculty Mentors: Robert Asarnow and Rashmita Mistry

Background: EdM, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Human Development and Psychology.

CBD post-doctoral fellows

Kek Khee Loo is a developmental-behavioral pediatrician who has an NIH K08 award to study maternal stress and gender preference in China. The study has two main goals. The first is to examine whether familial expectation to have a male child in China fosters higher levels of maternal psychological distress during pregnancy, thereby generating effects mediated through maternal physiological alterations on the developing fetus. The second is to determine whether maternal anxiety over the gender of the fetus, with postnatal modulation of anxiety depending on the gender of the child, may be associated with the quality of mother-son and mother-daughter interaction.
Faculty Mentors: Patricia Greenfield and Tom Weisner
Background: Received M.D. from University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine..

CBD Alumni

Don Favareau

Maya Gratier

Gui Xue is interested in three fundamental questions in brain-language relationship. First, are there universal cognitive and neural mechanisms that support language processing across very different written systems? If not, to what extent are these mechanisms affected by the design principle of different language systems? Second, what is the role of language experience in shaping the neural circuits of language processing? Third, is there any cultural effect on the acquisition and processing of a second language that is significantly different from the native one?
Faculty mentors: Russell Poldrack, Mirella Dapretto
Background: Received Ph.D. from the Institute of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Beijing Normal University

Jonas Kaplan
Background: Received PhD from UCLA, Department of Psychology
PhD Dissertation title: "The neuropsychology of executive function: Hemispheric contributions to error monitoring and feedback processing."

Ted Hutman's (psychology) The topics that I studied as a graduate student include language acquisition in children with autism and the possibility that parents can scaffold language learning by playing with their autistic child in a responsive and undemanding manner. I investigated the relationship between a child's autism and maternal well-being. Finally, I explored relationships between maternal cognitions about parenting a child with autism and maternal behaviors during play with their autistic child.

Istvan Molnar-Szakacs
As a pre-doctoral trainee, my work in social cognitive neuroscience focused on the role of the human mirror-neuron system in action understanding. I believe that action is the a priori foundation for social interaction and communication. The simulation mechanism implemented by the mirror neuron system is the neural correlate for action representation. It is an open system, able to learn and thus may participate in motor skill acquisition, the development of imitation, and has been implicated as a neural substrate for the evolution of language and human culture. I used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) as complementary neuroimaging methods to study the neural correlates of non-verbal social communication through action observation, imitation and gesture perception. One of my goals was to characterize the neural network subserving these abilities and to better understand the relationship between language and action at the neural level.

Understanding the actions of others involves mapping them onto one's own neural representations. However, if one is to simulate the actions of others in order to understand them, what are the mechanisms for maintaining a sense of self or agency? The mirror neuron system may also be important for mapping others' physical body, or self onto the representations of our own. Based on this theory, I work on related studies that attempt to address the relationship between the subjective self and objective physical self. In particular, I am interested in self-representation across different modalities, perspective taking, agency and body-part representation. This work is taking me to the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland. As a post-doc in the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience headed by Dr. Olaf Blanke, I will continue work on these and related topics using neuroimaging, behavioral and patient studies.

Jennifer Pfeifer (Psychology)
I'm interested in social cognitive development during the transition from childhood to adolescence, including how this is related to functional changes in the developing brain. Most recently I've been interested in how - and why - personal and social identities shaped during this time impact both self and social perception, such as self-knowledge retrieval or intergroup biases in neural processes underlying empathetic responses (with Drs. Matt Lieberman, Mirella Dapretto, and Marco Iacoboni). I study these same phenomena on the behavioral level, by examining the relationships between ethnic identity and intergroup attitudes (with Dr. Andrew Fuligni), as well as what events during the school day make gender or ethnic identity salient (with Dr. Christia Brown). In addition, I'm interested in establishing whether the development of inhibitory control affects children's performance on tasks measuring implicit associations (with Drs. Christia Brown and Matt Lieberman).

Special Note: Jennifer Pfeifer has received the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award for Individual Predoctoral Fellows for a 24 month term. The title of her project is "Neural Basis of Self-Concept Development in Adolescence."

Background: Received BA from Stanford University, Department of Psychology

Brendesha Tynes (Psychological Studies in Education) research explores the role of the Internet in child and adolescent development with special attention to intergroup relations and racial identity. She is particularly interested in racialized discourse in the various online contexts children and adolescents frequent, including chat rooms, discussion boards and websites.

She will be continuing the work she began at UCLA and CBD in her new position as an Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Eileen Anderson-Fye was awarded the CBD certificate during Fall 2005 in recongition of her completion of all CBD requirements. She was also the receipent of the UCLA Chancellor's Award for outstanding postdoctoral research.

Special Note: When Eileen Anderson-Fye was a CBD Post-doctoral Fellow she received the UCLA Chancellor's Award for Postdoctoral Research

Greg Bryant Now assistant Professor in Communication Studies here at UCLA.
Faculty mentors: John Schumann, Clark Barrett
Background: Received his Ph.D. from University of California, Santa Cruz in Cognitive
Psychology

Melinda (Mel) Chen, Assistnant Professor in the department of Gender & Women's Studies at the Univrsity of California, Berkeley. A U.C. President's Postdoctoral Fellow, interests lie in cognitive linguistics, cultural studies, emotion studies, and gender studies. During her stay at CBD, Mel was be working more empirically, exploring issues of biculturality and emotion.
Faculty Mentors: Patricia Greenfield and Marjorie Orellana
Background: Received Ph.D. in Linguistics at Berkeley in May 2004, with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality.