Current Graduate Students

Cristina Andriani
Cristina works with Dr. Jaan Valsiner and Dr. Thomas Kuehne and is exploring some of the parallels between Jewish victimization during the Holocaust and Palestinian victimization in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as a dynamic of displaced aggression.

Jessica Armstrong
Jessica works with Dr. Kathleen Palm Reed. She received her B.A. and M.A. in Forensic Psychology in 2010 from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Her overarching research and clinical interests include substance use disorders and trauma, particularly as they intersect with culture.

Sandina Begic
Sandina studies issues related to children born of wartime rape, specifically in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Her current research explores the emotional basis of stigma attached to children born of rape. She received a B.A. in German Language and Literature and a B.S. in Psychology from Boise State.

Joshua Berger
Joshua Berger works with Dr. Michael Addis. His main area of interest is the relationship between adherence to masculinity norms and help-seeking behavior in men, particularly veterans. His work seeks to establish predictors for men’s use of mental health services, and thereby to help devise well-informed strategies for men to access these services. In the future, he hopes to integrate research and clinical work to help coordinate mental health care for veterans. He is currently completing his mini-practicum at the Worcester VA Outpatient Clinic. His Master’s thesis was titled “Men's Reactions to Mental Health Labels, Different Forms of Help-Seeking, and Sources of Help-Seeking Advice.”

Kenneth Cabell
Kenny works with Dr. Jaan Valsiner. His research interests include how human psychological experience and human psychological functioning are culturally organized through the use of semiotic mediation and symbolic action. Empirical interests include: (1) trait-inferencing and (2) semiotic trapping. Theoretical interests include methodological innovation such as transcending models of causality.

Amy Cameron
Amy works with Dr. Kathleen Palm Reed. Her research interests include basic emotional and cognitive processes that are implicated in the etiology and maintenance of disorders related to emotion regulation and improving treatment outcomes for these disorders. Her Master’s thesis was titled, “Reactivity to negative Affect in Smokers: Insight Into Rule-Governed Behavior." She is currently completing her externship at Butler Hospital in the Women’s Partial Hospital Program in Providence, RI. Her doctoral dissertation will be a Phase I Open Trial of DBT with integrated values to improve treatment motivation and engagement in individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder.

Maggie Campbell
Maggie works with Dr. Johanna Ray Vollhardt. Maggie has a wide range of research interests involving the areas of peace, violence, and social responsibility. Currently, she is especially interested in conceptions of good and evil; including how people develop beliefs about good and evil, the role of religion in this process, and how these beliefs relate to people’s political and social opinions. She is also interested in the endorsement of redemptive violence, political media and decision-making, moral reasoning, and ways of developing a culture of peace.

Ellen Darling
Ellen is a third-year doctoral student working with Dr. James Córdova.

Martin Dege
Martin works with Dr. Jaan Valsiner. He focuses on the story, history and philosophy of psychology as well as the gap between theory and applied research in psychology. His publications cover a wide range of topics including qualitative methods, German-Scandinavian Critical Psychology, the relevance of Hegel and Marx for psychology, psychology of religion, identity politics, and others. His doctoral dissertation examines the construction of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in the field of Action Research. He earned his MA from Clark University with a thesis entitled: "The Clark identity: Investigating hegemonic discourses in an academic setting."

Angela de Dios
Angela works with Dr. Jeffrey Arnett and her interests are primarily cultural identity development in immigrant and ethnic minority emerging adults. Her past research includes mixed methods studies about ethnic identity in Asian American emerging adults, the experiences of cultural identity in Filipino Americans, and the relationship between ethnic identity and religious identity in Filipino American emerging adults. Her master's thesis was titled "Cultural identity in Filipino American emerging adults."

Ayfer Dost
Ayfer studies self and identity development in adolescents and adults: how specific types of selves are related to cognitive and affective processes such as perspective taking and conflict resolution.

Jordan Downing
Jordan is a fifth-year doctoral student working with Dr. Abbie Goldberg. She is currently completing her pre-doctoral internship at Tewksbury Hospital.

Alyssa Faro
Alyssa Faro is a first-year doctoral student working with Dr. Laura McKee. Her research interests surround parenting practices and outcomes for children at risk of developing internalizing disorders. She received her BA in Psychology from Connecticut College in 2009.

Lizzie Flamm
Lizzie is a third-year doctoral student working with Dr. Wendy Grolnick.

CJ Fleming
CJ works with Dr. James Córdova in the Couples' Lab. Her master's thesis was entitled: “The Help Seeking Attitudes and Behaviors of Couples in the Marriage Checkup."

Katie Frazier
Katie works with Dr. Rachel Falmagne. Her research interests involve societal and feminist approaches to gender identity and ideologies, particularly as they relate to interpersonal violence. Katie has completed her master's thesis at Clark, titled "Empowered victims? Interplays of gender, 'race,' class and age in women's constructions of safety" and is currently pursuing her doctoral degree.

Tatiana Gray
Tatiana works with Dr. James Córdova. Her research interests include couples communication patterns and positive relationship functioning. Her master’s thesis will focus on how couples navigate the shift out of a conflict conversation; in addition it will examine personal characteristics associated with smoother shifts and how that might predict relationship longevity and satisfaction over time.

Jonathan Green
Jonathan Green works with Dr. Michael Addis and is a member of Clark’s Men’s Well-Being Research Group. Jonathan is currently in his second year of externship at the Worcester Outpatient Clinic of the Boston VA Healthcare system. His overarching research interests include masculine gender socialization, self-harm, and help-seeking behaviors in men. He is in the process of collecting data for his doctoral dissertation, which examines the functions of several methods of direct and indirect self-harm, while also exploring the impact that social norms and masculine gender socialization has on one’s selection of self-harm method.

Craig Gruber
Craig works with Dr. Jaan Valsiner. His research interests include courage and decision-making as well as the role courage plays in educational situations such as continuing education beyond secondary school, the role of courage in student writing, student self-selection of courage terms in graduation recommendation advising, and self-identification of courage in highly performing students. He is currently a Lecturer in Psychology at Northeastern University. His doctoral dissertation focuses on the construction of courage; personal resiliency in educational settings.

Amanda Harp
Amanda works with Dr. James Córdova in Integrative Behavioral Couple Therapy while pursuing her research interests in optimizing couples' functioning. She completed her master’s thesis, “Constraint Commitment: A Sustaining Factor in Same-Sex Relationships” and has completed her pre-doctoral internship in Health Psychology at Duke University Medical Center with rotations in the Transplant and Pain Clinics. She is now completing her doctoral dissertation by developing a survey to assess for partner undermining of weight loss (full details at http://tinyurl.com/Clark-Study).

Rachel Ishikawa
Rachel Zack Ishikawa works with Dr. Esteban Cardemil. Her research explores mental health help-seeking and factors related to the use and underuse of mental health services among Latinos, using both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Through her current dissertation research, she aims to identify factors that influence follow-up to specialty mental health care among depressed Latino primary care patients. This research is funded through an NIMH NRSA-Kirschstein Predoctoral Fellowship.

Theresa Jackson
Theresa works with Dr. Rachel Falmagne. She is interested in the sociocultural construction of menstruation, sexuality, and the body. She is currently investigating the menarche experience among an urban population of adolescents. She is also more broadly interested in qualitative methodology and critical psychology. Her master's thesis was titled, “Women wearing white: Discourses of menstruation and the menarche experience.”

Lilia Juarez-Gil
Lilia works with Dr. Jeffrey J. Arnett. Her research interests involve emerging adults’ romantic relationships.

Nikita Kharlamov
Nikita works with Dr. Jaan Valsiner. His current research is on the culturally-guided microgenesis of environment-related meaning in urban settings. Nikita’s other research interests include the development of the concept of marginality, and the reception of ideas of the Chicago School in contemporary urban studies. His master’s thesis was titled, “The city as a sign: A developmental-experiential approach to spatial life.”

Lori Kinkler
Lori is working with Dr. Abbie Goldberg. Through her research she seeks to explore new constructions of gender, sexual orientation, and family. She has a strong desire to examine the ways in which an essentialist approach to the study of these issues serve to support certain political agendas which ultimately harm and marginalize groups identified as “different.” Lori is currently completing her externship at Hampshire College Health and Counseling Services in Amherst, MA. Her doctoral dissertation will focus on the experiences and challenges of single adoptive parents by choice.

Katie Lacasse
Katie is working with Dr. Joseph de Rivera. Her research interests span a variety of topics all broadly encompassing socially responsible behavior. She is currently researching the role of self-perceptions in motivating people who "go green" in small ways to take further personal and political action to mitigate climate change. She is also interested in the roles of emotion and social identity in charitable behavior, and the presentation of intergroup conflicts in the media. She completed her master's thesis in May 2011, which is entitled “Performing Green Behaviors Alters the Political Importance of Climate Change.”

Heather Mangione
Heather is working with Dr. Maricela Correa-Chávez. She received her B.A. in Psychology from the State University of New York at New Paltz in 2007 and her Masters in Psychology from the State University of New York at New Paltz in 2011. Her research interests focus around immigration, culture and qualitative methodology.

Kristine Marbell
Kristine (KK) is a doctoral student from Ghana working with Dr. Wendy Grolnick. Her research focuses on optimal parenting behaviors that promote children's social and emotional well-being. Kristine is also interested in how cultural values shape parenting behaviors and children's responses to these behaviors. She has conducted two studies in Ghana examining the effects of autonomy-supportive parenting. Her doctoral dissertation will be a cross-cultural mixed-methods study that examines how Ghanaian and American children's self-concept moderates the relation of autonomy-supportive parenting to emotional well-being and academic motivation. She is currently completing her externship at the Boston Medical Center/ SPARK Center in Mattapan, MA where she works with children from diverse backgrounds with trauma histories.

Lucas Mazur
Lucas Mazur is working under the direction of Dr. Johanna Vollhardt. He is interested in victim consciousness and the dynamics of social conflict between ethnic, national and religious groups. He also explores the relationship between prototypicality judgments and outgroup-directed prosocial behavior. Lucas received an M.A. in Sociology from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland and an M.A. in Psychology from the New School for Social Research in New York City. In between these degrees, he managed the fundraising campaigns of a combination of local, national and international charities within both the state and federal governments in Western New York.

Jessica Mckenzie
Jessica is working with Dr. Lene Arnett Jensen. Broadly speaking, her research interests are morality, religion, and modernity. The title of her master's thesis is "Growing Closer to God: Moral Development from Two Divinity Perspectives." In her upcoming dissertation project, she will examine psychological conceptualizations of globalization across generations in Thailand.

Amanda Mikedis
Amanda is working with Dr. Wendy Grolnick. Amanda’s research interests lie in understanding parental factors, such as providing autonomy support, and their influence on adolescents' health behaviors, emotions, and well-being.

Oswaldo Moreno
Oswaldo is working with Dr. Esteban Cardemil. Oswaldo’s research interests are in the area of mental health care as well as the understanding of pathways towards mental health help seeking behaviors among Latinos in the United States through cultural and contextual approaches. His master’s thesis was titled “Religiosity, Spirituality, and Mental Health Services: An Exploratory Study of Help Seeking among Latinos.” He was recently awarded a summer fellowship through a NIH/NCMHD-funded Minority Health and Health Disparities International Research Training Program to collaborate in research at the National Institute of Psychiatry of Mexico (Epidemiological Division).

Melinda Ippolito Morrill
Melinda works with Dr. James Córdova in the Center for Couples and Family Research. Her research interests lie in the intersection between couples intimate relationships and their co-parenting and parenting behaviors. Her master's thesis (2008) was entitled “Pathways between marriage and parenting for wives and husbands: The role of co-parenting.”

April Moyer
April is working with Dr. Abbie Goldberg. She is interested in studying families in diverse contexts, especially foster care and adoption. She received her B.S. in Psychology from Iowa State University and her M.A. in Developmental Psychology from San Francisco State University.

Rashmi Nair
Rashmi is working with Dr. Johanna Ray Vollhardt. Rashmi is interested in the factors that lead to intergroup helping or tension. More specifically, she studies inclusive and exclusive victim consciousness in the Indian context. She is interested in the impact of these distinct kinds of victim beliefs on intergroup relations between various minority groups in India. Additionally, she is further expanding the concept of inclusive victim consciousness, its scope and exploring the different underlying motivations – Strategic/Ingroup focused motivations or Outgroup focused. In addition to this, Rashmi is also currently working on focus group interviews with Bhutanese and other refugee and ethnic minority groups.

Tamara Nelson
Tamara is a first-year doctoral student working with Dr. Esteban Cardemil.

Niyati Pandya
Niyati is a doctoral student working with Dr. Lene Jensen. Her research focuses on moral development among children in India. She graduated in May 2009 with her M.Sc. in Human Development & Family Studies from M. S. University of Baroda, India.

Jacqueline N. Raftery
Jackie is working with Dr. Wendy Grolnick. Her research interests include the development of coping with a special focus on how social contexts facilitate more adaptive coping. Her master’s thesis is titled “Children’s coping with academic failure: Relations with contextual and motivational resources supporting competence.”

Christopher Reigeluth
Chris is working with Dr. Michael Addis. His research interests include adolescent development and the influences of social learning and gender socialization on male development and behavior. Chris is particularly interested in policing of masculinity and understanding the range of experiences that boys have with this social process.

Hannah Richardson
Hannah is working with Dr. Abbie Goldberg. For her doctoral dissertation, she is researching the impact of marriage equality on same-sex couples living in Massachusetts. For her master’s thesis, she researched the experiences of lesbian couples that completed transracial adoptions. Her clinical training has focused on providing psychotherapy to college students, LGBT-identified individuals, and low-income populations.

Monica Sanchez
Monica is working with Dr. Esteban Cardemil. Her research interests include understanding the effects of culture on psychopathology. She is currently completing her externship at Children's Friend in Worcester, MA. Her doctoral thesis will focus on the effect of intergenerational conflict within immigrant families and its effect on externalizing and internalizing disorders in immigrant children.

Ingrid Sarmiento
Ingrid's interests include multicultural mental health, mental health disparities, family functioning and depression. She is currently completing her pre-doctoral internship at the Suffolk University Counseling Center.

Joseph Schwab
Joe is working with Dr. Jeffrey Arnett. His research interests include the development of identity, concepts of self, and religious and spiritual beliefs, specifically focusing on how these concepts are constructed through narratives. He is currently working on a project investigating the construction of spiritual and existential identities in emerging adults. He recently completed his master’s thesis, titled “Religious meaning making: Positioning identities through stories.”

Julia Sollenberger
Julia is a doctoral student with Dr. James Córdova in the Marriage Checkup Lab. Her research interests include processes such as intimacy and emotion regulation that affect marital quality and satisfaction. The title of her master's thesis is "Emotion Skills Predict Marital Satisfaction Across the Transition to Marriage."

Matthew Syzdek
Matthew's overarching research interests are in gender, class, mental health, and social justice. Presently, he is investigating how masculine gender role socialization is associated with cognitive and behavioral vulnerabilities to depression and anxiety. He is currently writing his dissertation on gender-based motivational interviewing for increasing mental health service use in college men.

Gabe Twose
Gabe works with Joseph de Rivera, studying post-conflict societal reconciliation mechanisms. He received his Masters degree in 2010, before spending a year in Monrovia conducting his dissertation research on Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Gabe received a 2010 Grant-in Aid from The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, and recently served as the Student and Early Career Chair of The Society for the Study of Peace Conflict and Violence.

Juan Zhong
Juan is working with Dr. Jeffrey Arnett. Her research examines the ways in which emerging adults change their conceptions of adulthood, organize new ways of living, and revision their future lives in contemporary China. She is interested in the cultural structure that shapes the experiences of emerging adulthood.