About Me

I received my B.A. from Tufts University, graduating summa cum laude with a double major in Psychology and Community Health.

I am interested in pursuing a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology to study how early life stress, trauma, environmental context, and genetic factors intersect with minoritized identity to shape sensitive periods in neurodevelopment and influence risk for psychopathology such as depression and PTSD.

My goal is to better understand these intersecting mechanisms to inform early identification, prevention, and intervention strategies that promote resilience among at-risk youth.

Research Interests and Goals

I am interested in using multimodal methods to investigate how early adversity shapes neurobiological, psychological, and environmental pathways that confer risk for depression and PTSD psychopathology.

Mechanistically, I am interested in employing neuroimaging approaches such as fMRI and magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) to examine blunted reward sensitivity as a neural mechanism of depression and to explore neural circuitry of memory recall processes in individuals with trauma histories. I am also interested in the role of epigenetic regulation, particularly how DNA methylation and DNA-based polygenic indices capture the dynamic intersection between genes and environmental context.

I am interested in contextual impacts of lived environments, including factors such as neighborhood disadvantage, socioeconomic status, water pollutants, and tobacco exposure, in shaping developmental and mental health outcomes. I am motivated to develop an understanding of mental health, integrating environmental and biological risk to reveal how depression and PTSD “gets under the skin.”

Ultimately, I aim to bridge mechanistic science and intervention implementation, using insights from neurobiological and psychosocial research to design and disseminate interventions that target reward sensitivity and memory processes in youth exposed to early life stress.

Research Experience

At McLean Hospital, I work as a Post-Baccalaureate Research Assistant in Dr. Diego Pizzagalli’s Laboratory for Affective and Translational Neuroscience, contributing to the Early Life Stress and Depression: Functional and Molecular Approaches study (NIH Grant 5R01MH095809-09). This project examines the neurobiological and behavioral mechanisms through which early adversity contributes to risk for depression and other affective disorders. In this role, I work with fMRI-based paradigms such as the Value of Control (VOC) task to investigate how early adversity shapes neural responses to reward, agency, and motivation, and the Emotional Stroop task to examine attentional and affective biases toward emotionally salient or threatening stimuli. Together, these tasks help characterize the functional brain circuitry underlying stress-related alterations in emotion regulation and reward sensitivity.