Announcing the 2022 Scholars and Mentors for the Towards 2044: Horowitz Early Career Scholar Program

Kriss-Ann Gayle's  family immigrated from Jamaica in 2005. Her parents valued education but, because they only completed high school, they often did not have the tools to support her education. She applied to university and was happy to be the recipient of a Fellowship that gave her the financial support that she needed to go to school. This fellowship also connected her with a support network that helped her to be successful as a first-generation student. In her undergraduate career, she worked in multiple Psychology labs because she knew she wanted to conduct research. Through her participation in child development and social psychology labs, she was able to ascertain my research interest. Without the support of her formal and informal mentors that she gained throughout her academic career, she would probably never have gained these experiences or applied to graduate school. She believes that one of the primary benefits of the Horowitz Early Scholar Program is the mentoring and social support that it will provide. As a first-generation student and a Black woman, she believes that having a mentor who understands her background, as well as the special challenges that she faces, would help her to be successful in graduate school and beyond.

Briana Lopez is a first-year doctoral student in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin (UT). Prior to beginning her graduate studies, she graduated from the University of North Florida (UNF) with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and concentration in child psychology. At UNF Briana worked as a research assistant in various labs where she studied child and adolescent health in relation to contextual risk factors, discrimination and stereotyping, and parent-child relationships. These early research experiences helped her hone her primary research focus, which centers on understanding how contextual, familial, and cultural factors influence child well-being and academic achievement. She places particular attention to the experiences of marginalized and under-represented racial/ethnic groups and approaches her research through a strengths-based, resilience lens. Briana utilizes both community and nationally-representative samples and employs both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Her current research projects examine the relation between school cultural and language supports, parental involvement, and academics during elementary school using large-scale, nationally-representative data from ECLS-K. Another key project seeks to illuminate the role of school transition supports and kindergarten students’ transition challenges on their short-and long-term achievement and socioemotional well-being.

Zina Noel (she/they) is a pre-doctoral graduate student and IES fellow in the Human Development and Social Policy program at Northwestern University. Drawing from her international policy and early educator background, Zina explores the intersection of early childhood development and civic society by studying interactions between public and social institutions and young children, their families, and their communities. Zina's research currently centers on the identity development processes for mixed preschoolers, first-time parents, and early educators and how these identities influence and are influenced by the U.S. family and child policy environment. 

Zina is also deeply interested in developing interdisciplinary collaborations and community-based research partnerships that seek to bridge emergent developmental science, family and child policy, and the day-to-day of raising a young child in America. Previously, Zina worked in research, policy, and strategy development for various educational organizations and initiatives in the U.S. and abroad. She earned a master's in education from Harvard Graduate School of Education, a post-bac certificate from the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs, and a bachelor's degree from Lewis and Clark College.

Erika Roach is a rising third-year doctoral student in Clinical Science at UC Berkeley. She received both her B.A. in Psychology and Human Biology and her M.A. in Psychology from Stanford University. At UC Berkeley, she works under the mentorship of Dr. Qing Zhou in the Family & Culture Lab. Erika's research interests focus on emotion, stress, and developmental psychopathology. Specifically, her work aims to elucidate the relationships between race and culture-related stress, emotional processes, and mental health in youth and their families. Prior to beginning her Ph.D., she served as Associate Director of the Office for Inclusion, Belonging, and Intergroup Communication at Stanford, taught in the university's Department of Psychology, and managed youth mental health community outreach efforts at Stanford's Center for Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing.

Tracy Zehner is a doctoral student in Human Development and Family Studies at Purdue University, under the advisement of Dr. Sara Schmitt. After earning her bachelor’s from the University of Illinois and master’s from the University of Hartford in music education, her professional career from 2008-2020 was spent working in public schools in Illinois, Connecticut, and Indiana as an elementary music teacher. She was active on social-emotional learning (SEL) committees at each school she taught, which led her to pursue a Ph.D. where she researches the mechanisms underlying children’s self-regulation and social skills and the implications these skills have on student success. She is interested in designing and evaluating early childhood self-regulation and culturally sensitive social-emotional learning (SEL) interventions that would help reduce academic risk for children entering school as well as the differential outcomes of these interventions. Her long-term goals include establishing research-practitioner partnerships with schools and state agencies regarding children’s social-emotional well-being and working with preservice teachers in equipping them with resources and strategies to educate children while implementing self-regulatory and SEL practices in the classroom. Outside of her Ph.D. program, she enjoys teaching piano and seeking adventure with her husband and three children.

Perla B. Gámez is an Associate Professor of developmental psychology at Loyola University Chicago. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and was a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Dr. Gámez leads a program of research focused on the language and literacy development of bilingual children (also referred to as dual language learners, English learners). Her current research examines how variations in the features of language that children are exposed to at home and in school impact their language and literacy skills (Spanish, English). Currently, her work is funded by the National Institutes of Health. Her work has been funded by the William T. Grant Foundation and the National Science Foundation. She also received a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship and an Institute for Education Sciences Dissertation Year Fellowship. Dr. Gámez’s teaching and mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students has earned her the Sujack Award for Teaching Excellence at Loyola University. 

Rachel A. Gordon is Professor of Sociology at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Gordon’s research broadly examines contextual, social, and policy factors that affect children and families. Her current intellectual pursuits aim to develop sustainable approaches for continuous measure improvement that engage multiple stakeholders in culturally sustaining co-creation. Throughout her career, she has studied early child care and education, parental employment, multigenerational families, neighborhood dynamics, youth peer groups, and appearance-related identity cues. Her research has been funded by numerous sources including IES, NIH, and NSF. She is the author of two textbooks (Regression Analysis for the Social Sciences; Applied Statistics for the Social and Health Sciences, both published by Routledge) and has published her research in leading academic journals including the American Journal of Evaluation, Child Development, Criminology, Demography, Developmental Psychology, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, Journal of Marriage and Family, and Journal of Research on Adolescence. Trained as a developmental scientist and public policy scholar, Gordon works at the intersection of academic research and social policy, exemplified by directing the Illinois Family Impact Seminars for a decade.

Dr. Fantasy T. Lozada is an Associate Professor of Developmental Psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University where she is the director of the School, Home, and Internet contexts of EmotionaL Development (SHIELD) Lab. She completed her Ph.D. in Lifespan Developmental Psychology at North Carolina State University and postdoctoral training at the University of Michigan as a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Center for the Study of Black Youth in Context. Her work explores the interplay of culture, race, and emotions within parenting socialization practices and indicators of socioemotional competence among Black and Brown families across cultural contexts. Her current research projects include (1) Action Research Teams for Culturally Responsive Teaching among middle and high school teachers, (2) Understanding emotional code-switching among African American youth, and (3) YPAR methods for investigating race, emotion, and positive youth development. Her work can be found in various academic journals including: Child Development, Emotion Review, Journal of Black Psychology, and Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology.

Misaki N. Natsuaki, Ph.D. is Professor of Psychology at University of California, Riverside. Originally from Japan and raised in Belgium and the US, she received her BA and MA from International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan, and her Ph.D. in Human Development from University of California, Davis. She held a postdoctoral appointment at the Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota.

Guided by the developmental psychopathology framework, Dr. Natsuaki’s research emphasizes the importance of biology-context interplay in understanding the development of (mal)adjustment during the transition from childhood to adolescence. In particular, she examines how, why, and for whom puberty is linked to youths’ psychological health. Her research suggests that the effect of puberty must be understood in the contexts in which it occurs. The recent project is an interdisciplinary study of acne – a neglected hallmark of adolescence – and mental health. Dr. Natsuaki is part of the investigative team of the Early Growth and Development Study, a longitudinal adoption project that follows adoptees and their birth and adoptive families from birth to now adolescence. The project aims to unpack family influences on child development by attending to both biological and environmental mechanisms underlying the growth and changes of family members.

Jingjing Sun's research has centered on children’s cognitive, social, and emotional development in middle childhood with an emphasis to reduce inequity among racially and ethnically minoritized children. In particular, she is interested in examining how learning and development unfold during collaborative dialogue. The privilege to work with Indigenous communities in the Flathead Nation, as well as schools in urban and rural settings in both China and the United States, has profoundly shaped her research agenda. Collaborating with community members and interdisciplinary colleagues, her work examines the impact of broader ecological systems, such as culture, land, community and tribal sovereignty, on learning and students’ social and emotional development. Further, she have expanded this research to examine teacher learning and wellbeing as they engage in extended professional development embedded within critical group reflections. She specializes in designing mixed-methods research to understand child development from different strands of data. She is grateful for having participated in many early-career scholar training programs, including an AERA-SRCD Early Career Research Fellowship and a prestigious Early-Stage Investigator Award from the National Institutes of Health. These opportunities have significantly advanced her career development. She is committed to giving back and supporting future early-career scholars.