Developmental Psychology Home

Graduate Students

Current Students' Biographies

Sarah Beal is a fifth year student from Dayton, Ohio. She completed her undergraduate at Wright State University. Her research interests include adolescent development and future orientation, and how that applies to both decision making and behavior in adolescence and early adulthood. She has been a teaching assistant for Introduction to Psychology and has also taught Child Development as well as assisting in Lifespan Development, Learningand Motivation, and Research Methods. She is currently working as a research assistant for the Court Improvement Project at the Center for Children, Families, and Law, focusing primarily on improving outcomes for youth in the foster care system.

Arielle Deutsch is a third year graduate student, originally from New York. She completed her undergraduate degree at SUNY Binghamton. Her research interests include a variety of topics within the development of sexuality, problem behavior, and risk behavior. She is currently a teaching assistant for Developmental Psychology.

Kate Duangdao is a fourth year graduate student originally from Southern California. She has a Master's Degree from San Diego State University. Her research interests include the stress, coping, and the influence of morality on variety of health behaviors such as: smoking, prosocial behaviors, and preventative health behaviors such as exercising, condom usage, and routine health screenings. Her dissertation focuses bridging the gap between moral emotions on health behaviors. She is currently a research assistant with Dr. Tim Nelson and teaches how to conduct a research project for an honors introduction to psychology course under the supervision of Dr. Manda Williamson.

Heidi Fleharty is a second year student from Fairmont, Nebraska, who received her undergraduate degree from UNL. Her research interests include the examination of preschool children's attention as well as spatial memory. She is currently working on her master's project, which looks into how different types of rest activities affect children's attention. She is currently a research assistant for the NebraskaMath grant. She works with Dr. Anne Schutte.

Rachel Hayes is an advanced student from Riverside, California, and completed her undergrad at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. She is interested the development of prosocial behaviors, and her research explores the question of what factors, internal and external to the individual, prompt the development of prosocial cognitions, emotions, and behaviors. In particular, she is interested in socialization factors present in parent-child relationships. Rachel is currently a research assistant for Dr. Gus Carlo, and is working on an NSF-funded grant to examine relations among maternal characteristics, parent-child relationship factors, and prosocial behaviors in Mexican American and European American adolescents. Rachel also teaches Lifespan Development and has taught Child Development and Introduction to Psychology.

Meredith Hope is a third year graduate student in the Developmental Psychology program at UNL. She earned her Bachelor of Arts from The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Following graduation, she worked as a research assistant in Youth Safety Lab at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, studying unintentional pediatric injury. Her research interests include resilience in child and adolescent development, intervention assessment, and child welfare policy.

Caitlin Hudac is a first year student from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Following her undergraduate work at the University of Chicago, she worked with children as a milieu counselor at a residential treatment facility. She then spent several years in Dr. Kevin Pelphrey's lab conducting neuroimaging research with young children with and without autism. Caitlin will be working with Dr. Dennis Molfese with a focus in developmental cognitive neuroscience. Her research interests involve the emergence of cognitive mechanisms during early development.

Maria I. Iturbide is a doctoral candidate in the Developmental Psychology program. Her research focuses on understanding factors associated with the well-being of Latino youth. Specifically, her work concentrates on ethnic identity development, acculturative stress, ethnic minority parenting, and their link to adolescent risk behavior.

Traci Kutaka is a third year graduate student from Mililani, Hawaii. She completed her undergraduate studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, California. Her research interests include: the development of mathematical learning and reasoning in early childhood; progressive early childhood education systems such as Reggio Emilia in Italy; and program evaluation. She has been a teaching assistant for the Psychology of Gender, Lifespan Development, and Learning & Motivation. She is currently working with Dr. Carolyn Pope-Edwards (Department of Developmental Psychology), Dr. Ruth Heaton (Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education) and Dr. Jim Lewis (Department of Mathematics and Statistics) as a research assistant for the NebraskaMATH grant, an NSF-funded state-wide program which seeks to improve mathematical achievement for all students and narrow the achievement gap for at-risk students in kindergarten through third grade.

Miriam M. Martínez is a third year student originally from Mexico. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Texas-Permian Basin. Her research interests lie in the examination of cultural and contextual variables in the adjustment of immigrant children and the cross- cultural validation of clinical assessments. She is currently working with Dr. Carlo in studies regarding the transmission of cultural and prosocial values in Mexican American families. She is a research assistant for Dr. Espy in an investigation to validate executive control tasks with Latino children. In addition, she is working with Dr. Grant in a study examining the risk and protective factors of meth use in urban and rural Nebraska.

Maggie Ortmann is a fourth year student from Madrid, Iowa. She received her B.A. in psychology (with a minor in business) from Saint Mary's University of Minnesota. Before starting graduate school at UNL, she worked for two years as a research assistant in Grazyna Kochanska's lab at the University of Iowa on a longitudinal study of social-emotional development, with a focus on the development of conscience. The research emphasized understanding the role of both parents in children's development. Maggie's research interests lie in the area of cognitive spatial memory development in young children, and the development of perception of symmetry axes. She has been a teaching assistant for Developmental and Introduction to Psychology and has been a research assistant for Dr. Anne Schutte looking at the role of experience on spatial working memory utilizing microgenetic methods . She is currently teaching Research Methods Labs.

Lixin Ren is a first year student from China who completed her undergraduate study at Fuzhou University of China. Her research interests focus on early childhood development. She is working with Dr. Carolyn Edwards.

Deanna Sandman is a fourth year student with a B.A. in Psychology from UNL. She is working with Dr. Gustavo Carlo to study moral development and prosocial behavior; her current research projects primarily examine antecedents of prosocial behaviors, especially in adolescence. She has been a teaching assistant for the undergraduate 350, 450, and 451 Research Methods courses and "handles" the Developmental Psychology website.

Jen Wolff is an advanced student from St. Louis, Missouri. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Jen's research interests include adolescent decision making and risk behavior and how family and peer influences are related. She has been a teaching assistant for Research Methods and Data Analysis (PSYC 350 and 450) and has also taught Lifespan Development and Child Behavior and Development. Jen's current assistantship is as the primary data analyst on an NIH funded grant, Puberty, emotionality, and self-regulation: Links to psychosocial adjustment.