As we wrap up another academic year and head into the summer, I'd like to take a moment to recognize the outstanding work of our graduate students. Below are just a few highlights from what has been a productive and exciting couple of months across the department!

Accepted/In Press Publications

•  Hua, J.P.Y. & Dal Bon, K. (2026). Social determinants of health and neurobiology across the schizophrenia course: A systematic review. JAMA Psychiatry.
• Kelley, Z., Lam, P. H., Huang, L., Trujillo, M. A., McLeod, L., & Helgeson, V. S. (2026). Racial discrimination and relationship outcomes: A meta-analysis. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 02654075261448934.
• Huang, L., Chen, E., Hayen, R., Kim, J., Passarelli, V., & Lam, P. H. (2026). Peer racial representation at school, social experiences, and inflammation among Black adolescents. Health Psychology.
  Ding, W., Niyogi, A., Taylor, J. A., & Tsay, J. S. (2026). Hypothesis testing governs strategic motor learning. npj Science of Learning.
• Waller, M. C. , Nambiar, D. , Tomasic, A. , Elston, M. & Thiessen, E. (2026). Characterizing children’s naturalistic narratives via machine learning. Language Development Research. 6(1).
• Yunusova, A., Levinthal, D. J., Lam, P., Brown, K. W., Branson, Z., Wu, S., Sanov, B., Liccione, A., Dutcher, J. M., Lindsay, E. K., & Creswell, J. D. (2026). Beyond chronic stress: Daily stress is associated with symptoms in irritable bowel syndrome. Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology.

Submitted/Under Review

• Dal Bon, K., Abram, S.V., Mathalon, D.H., Fryer, S.L., Song, S., Naeem, Z., Tang, N., Pulliam, L., Ford, J.M. No objective evidence of neuropsychological deficits in people with subjective cognitive decline following COVID-19 infection. Health Psychology.
• Yunusova, A., Levinthal, D. J., Lam, P., Brown, K. W., Branson, Z., Wu, S., Sanov, B., Dutcher, J. M., Lindsay, E. K., & Creswell, J. D. Bowel movement–related distress in IBS is shaped by context, symptoms, and stress in daily life. Gastroenterology.

Preprints

• Dal Bon, K., Hua, J.P.Y., Mathalon, D.H., Tang, N., Pulliam, L., Ford, J.M. (2026). Reduced functional connectivity and structural brain volumes in the striato-thalamo-cerebellar circuit in individuals with long COVID. bioRxiv.

Conference Presentations

•  Jess Smith  presented a poster at the Vision Sciences Society conference titled "Isolating Nongeniculostriate Inputs to Category-Specific Ventral Stream Responses in Blindsight".

• Julia J. Conti  had a conference poster accepted at the Cognitive Science Society conference titled "Confidence in Context: How Self-Beliefs Shape Discovery" and submitted a conference presentation to Psychonomics titled "Inside Blocked Practice: Verbal Evidence for the Attentional Mechanisms Driving Category Learning" (both co-authored by Kenneth R. Koedinger, and Paulo F. Carvalho).
• Katie Chase  will present a talk titled "Does Training on Isolated vs. Integrated Acoustic Features Impact Participants’ Ability to Reproduce Target Sounds?" at the Society for Music Perception and Cognition biennial conference in Evanston, Illinois, in July 2026.
• Max Xia  presented a poster titled "How Are Continuous Motor Skills Learned and Represented?" (co-authored with Verstynen, T.* and Tsay, J. S.*) at the Neural Control of Movement conference in Kobe, Japan, in April 2026.
• Anjuli Niyogi presented a talk titled "Understanding Explicit Sensorimotor Learning as a Process of Hypothesis Testing" (co-authored with Cisneros, E., Ding, W., Ivry, R. B., & Tsay, J. S.) at the Neural Control of Movement conference in Kobe, Japan, in April 2026.
• Indranil Nyamsuren presented a poster titled "Against Hemispheric Specialization for Motor Learning" (co-authored with Stathum, A., Mitchell, E., Lam, P., & Tsay, J. S.) at the Neural Control of Movement conference in Kobe, Japan, in April 2026.
• Eloise Gacetta had a poster accepted for presentation at the Cognitive Science Society conference in July 2026 titled "Dynamic and Functional Brain Mechanisms During Naturalistic Spatial Learning". She also had a flash talk accepted at Flux 2026 titled "How the Brain Parses Spatial, Linguistic, and Cognitive Load During Naturalistic Educational Learning".
• Asal Yunusova presented a talk titled “Predictors of bowel-movement distress in IBS: Episode characteristics, stress, and symptom severity in daily life” at the Digestive Disease Week 2026 conference in Chicago, Illinois. She was also featured in the GI Psychologist Community Spotlight, which highlights emerging researchers working at the intersection of gastroenterology and psychology.

Grants & Awards

• Max Xia received summer funding to attend the Computational Modeling Summer School.
• Jess Smith, Anjuli Niyogi, and Kaitlyn Dal Bon were awarded NSF Graduate Research Fellowships for the 2026 cycle.
• Raouf Belkhir received the Bobby Klatzky Publication Award.

Dissertation Developments

• Dr. Emefa Akwayena successfully defended her dissertation titled "The Role of the Ventral Visual Pathway in Object-Directed Action". She has accepted a position as a postdoctoral researcher working with Jorge Almeida and Alfonso Caramazza at the University of Coimbra in Portugal.

Professional Development

•  Jinhee Kim  will attend the Telluride Neuromorphic Computing Workshop this summer.
• Katie Chase  was selected as one of twelve participants in the Society for Music Perception and Cognition’s pre-conference Research Retreat in memory of David Huron. She will collaborate with researchers from Yale University, Seattle University, and Northwestern University on a project investigating how rhythmic complexity affects the listening experience under the leadership of Justin London at Carleton College.
• Dr. Fiona Horner served as the graduate student speaker at the Spring 2026 commencement ceremony, where she and fellow graduates Dr. Sophie Robert, Dr. Yuxi Xie, and Dr. Emefa Akwayena were hooded.

As we move toward the close of the semester, it’s a great moment to recognize the incredible accomplishments of our graduate students over the past few months. I’m excited to highlight what they’ve been working on.

Publications

•  Yunusova, A., Huang, C., Price, S., Joshi, K., Dutcher, J. M., Brown, K. W., Villalba, D. K., Tumminia, M. J., Creswell, K. G., Cohen, S., & Creswell, J. D. (in press). Depression trajectories and their associations with academic performance and sleep patterns among first year college students. BMC Psychology. 
• Foor, K., Trujillo, M. 2026, Outness, Relationship Satisfaction, and Perceived Health Among Sexual Minorities in Same- and Different-Gender Relationships. Manuscript submitted for publication at LBGT Health.

Conference Presentations

• Kaylee Foor presented a poster titled “Social Rejection, Social Support, and Cognition among LGBTQ+ Young Adults” at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) conference held in February 2026 in Chicago, IL.

Grants & Awards

• Alana Hodson and Urszula Oszczapinska received the Simon Teaching Award.
• Maria Chroneos and Julia Conti received the Hayes Service Award.
• Alana Hodson was nominated for the university-wide Graduate Student Teaching Award. Alana developed and taught an undergrad course on Aging and Cognition last semester with rave reviews from her students and teaching advisors.
• Raouf Belkhir won first place in the Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Championship. You can learn more in this article and watch his thesis presentation.
• Emiliano Irena Hernandez received the Scholarly Project Funding (formerly called GuSH Research Grants) for his second-year project that focuses on developing a new paradigm for social identity threat.
• Kaylee Foor received the Scholarly Project Funding (formerly called GuSH Research Grants) for her project “Intergroup Contact and Prejudice Toward Transgender Individuals”.

Dissertation Developments

• Maria Chroneos proposed her dissertation project titled “Smooth Pursuit Eye Movements in Childhood Hemispherectomy Patients: Behavioral and Neural Control”.
• Jenah Black proposed her dissertation project titled “Retroactive Effects of Transient Acoustic Interruptions on Fine-Grained Speech Representations and Predictive Language Processing.

Other News

• Dr. Sophie Robert has started a new position as a Postdoctoral Fellow at New York University (NYU) in the NYU Visual Neuroscience Training Program working with Jonathan Winawer.

Snowmageddon may have us all bundled up and dreaming of warmer days, but the incredible accomplishments of our graduate students over the past few months are more than enough to warm us up. As we make our way through February, I’m excited to highlight what our graduate students have been able to accomplish.

Publications

• Huang, L., Chen, E., Hayen, R., Kim, J., Passarelli, V., & Lam, P. H. (Revise and resubmit). Peer racial representation at school, social experiences, and inflammation among Black adolescents. Health Psychology.
• Yunusova, A., Levinthal, D., Lam, P., Brown, K. W., Branson, Z., Wu, S., Sanov, B., Liccione, A., Dutcher, J., M., Lindsay E. K., Creswell, J. D. (Revise and resubmit). Beyond chronic stress: Daily stress prospectively predicts symptoms in Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology.
• Yunusova, A., Huang, C., Price, S., Joshi, K., Dutcher, J. M., Brown, K. W., Villalba, D. K., Tumminia, M. J., Creswell, K. G., Cohen, S., & Creswell, J. D. (Revise and resubmit). Depression trajectories and their associations with academic performance and sleep patterns among first year college students. BMC Psychology.

Conference Presentations

• Kushani Shah will be presenting a poster titled "The Role of Trait Impulsivity in Craving, Attentional Bias, and Smoking Behavior" at the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco, to be held in March in Baltimore, MD.
• Emefa Akwayena will be presenting a talk titled “Grasping unseen physical properties of objects: The role of the ventral visual pathway in object-directed action” at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) Annual Meeting, to be held in March in Vancouver, British Columbia.
• Mady Davis-Troller will be presenting a poster titled "Using fNIRS to assess children's frontal connectivity while viewing digital media" (co-authors: Molly Niehaus, Smrithi Krishnaswamy, Dhanya Charan, Andres Torres, and Erik Thiessen) at the Cognitive Development Society meeting, to be held in April in Montreal, Canada.
• Anjuli Niyogi will be presenting a talk on how strategies are discovered during motor learning at the Neural Control of Movement conference, to be held in April in Kobe, Japan.
• Emiliano Irena Hernandez will be presenting a poster titled "The effects of experiencing gender identity-based stress on decision-making" with Dr. Mikey Trujillo at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) conference, to be held in February in Chicago, IL.
• Maria Chroneos presented a poster titled "Naturalistic visual search after childhood hemispherectomy" at the American Epilepsy Society meeting, held this past December in Atlanta, GA.
• Asal Yunusova submitted an abstract titled "Predictors of bowel-movement distress in IBS: Episode characteristics, stress, and symptom severity in daily life" to the Digestive Disease Week conference, to be held in May.

Grants & Awards

• Anjuli Niyogi received the Neural Control of Movement Scholarship.

Professional Development

• Emefa Akwayena completed a research rotation with Dr. Rich Ivry at UC Berkeley as part of the Carnegie Prize Fellowship.

Dissertation Developments

• Dr. Fiona Horner successfully defended her dissertation and presented her dissertation showcase titled “Time-Varying Psychosocial Predictors of Blood Glucose Among Adults with Type 1 Diabetes“ in January. She has started a behavioral scientist position at Oura.
• Dr. Sophie Robert successfully defended her dissertation and presented her dissertation showcase titled "Functional Organization of Large-Scale Cortical Networks After Pediatric Epilepsy Surgery: A Naturalistic fMRI Approach" in January.