On Wednesday, May 27, the Department of Psychology hosted its 55th Annual Research Festival featuring the research conducted by 13 students—clinical students present at the end of their second year in the program and all other students present at the end of their first year. Presentations of research spanning all areas within the department took place in two adjacent rooms at the Waterfront Activity Center.
Photo of Child Clinical graduate student, Mikela Ritter, presenting at the 2026 Psychology Department Research Festival
Talks and titles of all participating graduate speakers include:
Jess Meikle, Child Clinical — COVID-19 Stressors’ Impact on Youth Psychopathology Trajectories: Parenting as a Moderator
Yuqing Lei, Adult Clinical — Metacognition, Repeated Decisions, and Obsessive-Compulsive Symptoms
Christine Chang, Adult Clinical — Alcohol Use in Hispanic/Latine American Adults and The Moderating Roles of Coping In Response to Racial Discrimination: A Registered Report
Sam Lucero, Adult Clinical — How Tribal Community Members Talk about Substance Use: Preliminary Themes from Qualitative Interviews
Mikela Ritter, Child Clinical — The Daily Stress Process and Alcohol Use: Exploring Intra- and Inter-Individual Daily Stress Process-Alcohol Use Associations and Cross-Level Interrelations with Global Stress
Connor Smith, Child Clinical — Testing the Social-Contextual Framework of Solitary Drinking in Young Adults: A Pilot Study
Saivone Sanchious, Adult Clinical — Discrimination as a Unique Contextual Risk Factor: Associations with Maternal Mental Health and Early Child Adjustment
Jinhan Zhu, Adult Clinical — Investigating Pathway-Partitioned Polygenic Risk Scores for Schizophrenia: Insights into Clinical Variability in Two Patient Cohorts
Samantha Eaton, Cognition & Perception — Improving Newborn Brain MRI Analysis
John Romero, Cognition & Perception — Relating individual variation in functional networks to white matter connectivity.
Photo of Cognition and Perception graduate student, John Romero, presenting at the 2026 Psychology Department Research Festival
Ran Wei, Social Psychology & Personality — Asian Parents' Explanations of Racial Inequality with Adolescents
Lu Gao, Developmental — Students’ Adherence to and Perceptions of School Phone Restrictions: The Role of Social Achievement Goals
Venus Rekow-Antoniuk, Developmental — Mapping How Mexican Adolescents Use AI: Adoption patterns and psychological factors associated with AI use for companionship
Photo taken at the Waterfront Activity Center, with Lake Washington in the background, of all clinical graduate students who presented at the research festival in 2026 (L to R) Connor Smith, Sam Lucero, Jess Meikle, Mikela Ritter, Yuqing Lei, Saivone Sanchious, Jinhan Zhu, and Christine Chang