Announcing the 2024 Scholars and Mentors for the Towards 2044: Horowitz Early Career Scholar Program

Krystal Alvarez-Hernandez is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Northwestern University. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in Psychological Science from California State University San Marcos in 2022 and was awarded the Predoctoral Ford Foundation Fellowship in 2023. 

Raised as the eldest daughter of hard-working immigrants, Krystal grew up as a proud bilingual and bicultural Mexican American. At the age of 17, she became a mother, an experience that has profoundly influenced her interests and goals as a developmental scientist. She aims to examine the role of societal stressors (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic) on maternal adaptive processes related to pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing, and their children’s early cognitive trajectories, particularly within Latino communities. She hopes that this research will contribute towards alleviating early inequalities linked to the social determinants of health that Latino mothers and their children face in the United States.

Peter C. Dossen is an international student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He began his Ph.D. 2023 in the Human Sciences program specializing in Child Development/Early Childhood Education. Peter obtained his Bachelor of Science in Nursing from William V. S. Tubman University, Liberia, in 2016 and his Master of Arts in Child Development from the University of Haifa, Israel, in 2019. Peter's research interests revolve around the mechanism linking the association among the intergenerational transmission of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), attachment, parenting, children's mental health, social-emotional development, and academic achievement in a post-war country. He has worked as an instructor at William V. S. Tubman University's Department of Early Childhood and Primary Education and also as a Registered Nurse at the Rocktown Kunokudi Clinic, where he held various roles, including officer in charge (OIC), Maternal and Child Health Focal person, and Child and Adolescent Mental Health Clinician. His transition from clinical nursing practice to child development stemmed from witnessing the lack of educational opportunities for children in the clinic catchment communities where he was assigned. This experience ignited his passion for policy reform initiatives that promote a safe, stable, and nurturing environment where young children and their families can thrive. 

Christina Diaz Griep is a graduate student at the University of Houston in the Psychology (Developmental Cognitive Behavioral Neuroscience) program. She earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology from Florida International University (FIU). During her time at FIU, she worked as a research assistant under the mentorship of Dr. Eliza Nelson, investigating the relationship between infant fine motor skills and vocabulary development. After graduation, she worked as a lab manager in the Adult Development and Decision Lab at the University of Central Florida under the mentorship of Dr. Nichole Lighthall where she worked on a project investigating the development of science learning. Currently she works with Dr. Hanako Yoshida in the Cognitive Development Lab investigating the early attentional mechanisms that underlie language development with infants from various cultural backgrounds and households that speak more than one language. Her current master thesis project aims to document early multimodal input structure by coupling head mounted eye trackers with network analysis. This will allow her to observe infants’ moment-to-moment gaze behaviors during parent-infant object play to investigate microstructures on parent verbal input during social contingent interactions. Beyond her research, she is a dedicated toddler mom, and enjoys traveling with her family.

Javier Omar is originally from Miami, Florida, and the son of two Cuban immigrants. He is currently a doctoral candidate in Developmental and Psychological Sciences at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Prior to his time at Stanford, Javier taught secondary science in the San Antonio Independent School District. He received his B.S. in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology and B.A. in Human Health from Emory University.  

His research leverages mixed methods, strengths-based, and community-based participatory approaches to examine the social-emotional and psychosocial development of culturally and linguistically diverse children. His current work is situated within the Stanford-San Francisco Unified School District Partnership. It broadly focuses on assessing emotion knowledge development across a diverse cohort of preschoolers and examining the role of teacher beliefs and biases on social-emotional learning practices and student outcomes. Additionally, he is currently involved in a multi-institution, community-driven project focused on developing and validating a measure of youth immigration-related stress, trauma, and strength, where he is leading a qualitative study to explore how caregivers and youth perceive the impact of immigration-related experiences on youth psychosocial development and mental health.    

Outside of research, Javier is passionate about mentorship and community-engaged work with first-generation, low-income and Latine communities. 

Sharnel Vale-Jones, Yaagál, is Lingít (Alaska Native) from Yakutat, Alaska, belonging to Kwaashk’IKwáan (Raven, Humpy Salmon) Dis hítdaxáyáxat (Moon house). She is also the daughter of Teikweidí (Eagle, Brown Bear) and granddaughter of the Kaagwaantaan (Eagle, Beaver). Sharnel holds an M.S. in Clinical Psychology and is currently a PhD candidate at University of Alaska Anchorage’s Clinical-Community Psychology program. Prior to her graduate program, Sharnel dedicated nine years of her career to serving Alaska Native people in various capacities at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, including networking, improvement science, rural energy efficiency, and tobacco prevention. As a Lingít/European American individual, Sharnel is passionate about merging the two perspectives and weaving Indigenous knowledge into Western scholarship. She firmly believes engaging in culturally responsive research is crucial for decolonizing knowledge production. Sharnel's research interests lie in intergenerational trauma and resiliency strategies for Alaska Native (AN) and Indigenous people. Her dissertation aims to explore culturally relevant resilience strategies in Yaakwdáat Lingít (Yakutat Tlingit) child-rearing. In particular, this study seeks to understand family-level resilience through adaptive processes such as family connectedness, belief systems, organizational patterns, communication, and problem-solving, asking the question: How do Yaakwdáat Lingít people perceive child-rearing practices contributing to resilience?

Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson is a Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University and on leave as an Associate Professor at Columbia University’s School of Social Work. She earned her Ph.D. in Clinical and Community Psychology at the University of Virginia and completed a Clinical and Community Psychology Residency at Yale University's School of Medicine and a Fellowship in Applied Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. On the whole, Dr. Anderson aims to facilitate healing in Black families with practical applications of her research and clinical services, as well as through public engagement, teaching, mentorship, and policy recommendations. Dr. Anderson uses mixed methods to study discrimination and racial socialization in Black families and apply her findings to help families reduce their racial stress. She is particularly interested in how family-based interventions help to improve Black youth’s psychosocial well-being and health-related behaviors. Dr. Anderson is the developer and director of the EMBRace (Engaging, Managing, and Bonding through Race) intervention and CEO and Founder of RACE Space Inc., and loves to translate her work for a variety of audiences, particularly those whom she serves in the community, via blogs, video, and literary articles. Additionally, for her early career accomplishments, Dr. Anderson has been the recipient of over twenty awards, including national awards from SRA, SRCD, APS, and FABBS. Finally, Dr. Anderson was born in, raised for, and returned to Detroit and is becoming increasingly addicted to cake pops. 

Dr. Melissa Y. Delgado (she/her/ella), Ph.D. is a second-generation immigrant from the Arizona borderlands, where she now resides and is entering empty nesting with her husband and mother as her second of two wonderful sons is entering college. Dr. Delgado is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Human Development and Family Science at the University of Arizona’s Norton School of Human Ecology. She also co-chairs the Latinx Youth and Families Research Initiative at the UA Frances McClelland Institute for Children, Youth, and Families. Dr. Delgado earned her Ph.D. in Family Studies and Human Development from Arizona State University and was a W. T. Grant Foundation post-doctoral fellow. Her research addresses health and well-being disparities among Latinx youth, using cultural-ecological models to examine sociocultural stressors like ethnic discrimination and economic hardship. Her work highlights both protective and vulnerability factors within Latinx youth and their contexts, such as families and schools, to identify prevention and intervention opportunities. Employing mixed methods, she provides nuanced insights into the contextual processes affecting Latinx adolescents. Dr. Delgado is the Past Chair of the SRCD Latinx Caucus, a member of the SRCD Ethnic and Racial Issues Committee, and recently completed her term as Chair of the Society for Research on Adolescence Publications Committee. She is also an incoming SRCD Federal Executive Branch Fellow at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. 

Dr. Nada Goodrum is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of South Carolina. She received her B.A. in psychology and international studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Georgia State University. She completed her predoctoral internship and postdoctoral fellowship at the Medical University of South Carolina. Her research investigates family- and community-level influences on youth well-being among families affected by major stressors. Her work currently centers on the impact of family stressors, such as trauma, HIV and other chronic illness, racism, financial strain, and parental substance use, on child health and parent-child relationships. She is interested in parents’ role in promoting child and adolescent health and preventing the intergenerational transmission of risk. The goal of her research is to promote health equity by using knowledge about risk and protective factors to guide the development of family-based, trauma-informed prevention and intervention efforts. Her research is primarily conducted among communities of color, and she strives to adopt a multicultural and social justice lens in her work. She is also a mother of two young children and enjoys coffee, baking, and houseplants.

Dr. Alan Meca (él/he/him) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology in the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). He received his Ph.D. in Developmental Science from Florida International University in 2014 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Miami. Broadly, his expertise is in identity development, acculturation, cultural stress, and positive youth development. Although his research has focused generally on identity development, most of his work has been on cultural identity development and acculturation among ethnic/racial minoritized youth, particularly among Hispanic/Latinx populations. Towards this end, his research agenda has focused on identity development and cultural stressors and their effects on health risk behaviors, mental health, and educational achievement. In pursuit of this research agenda, he has published over 80 peer-reviewed manuscripts focused on personal, ethnic/racial, and national identity and on the cultural dynamics among Hispanic/Latinx families. Currently, his research agenda is focused on refining measures of cultural identity, understanding the processes that govern how ethnic/racial minoritized youth navigate their cultural environment (e.g., code-switching, cultural frame switching), and identifying ways we can support youth experiencing cultural stressors such as discrimination, bicultural stress, and negative context of reception. 

Dr. Adriana Weisleder is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Northwestern University. She completed a Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University and a postdoctoral fellowship in pediatric primary care research at NYU School of Medicine. Her work investigates how children learn language across diverse sociocultural contexts, with a focus on Latine multilingual learners. In particular, her research aims to expand descriptions of early language development in children from immigrant and language minority homes by combining observational and experimental measures with community perspectives about what is normative language development. A key goal of this work is to contribute to building a more robust evidence base for understanding patterns of language development across diverse contexts, and to reduce inequities in access to culturally and linguistically responsive speech and language services. As a Costa Rican immigrant to the US, and a Spanish-English bilingual, she recognizes that immigrant communities are those most impacted by these issues and those who stand most to gain from this work. She uses community-based approaches to incorporate the views and priorities of minoritized communities, particularly Spanish-speaking Latine families. She is also strongly committed to mentoring the next generation of scholars.