Graduate Student Recognition

Awards & Fellowships

Grey Raber received a fellowship through the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program to support their research exploring the impacts of early life adversity on children's perceptions of their futures and their behavior oriented towards long term goals. Grey is advised by Cheryl Kaiser and Shannon Dorsey.

Incoming students, John Romero (mentored by Ariel Rokem), Caley Mikesell (mentored by Lori Zoellner) and Ran Wei (mentored by Amber Williams) each received a competitive one quarter GSFEI Top Scholar recruitment award from the UW Graduate School

Incoming clinical graduate student, Abigail Ayemoba (mentored by Lili Lengua) was awarded a Graduate School Equity & Excellence (GSEE) Graduate Excellence Award for 2025-26.

Christine Chang, a clinical psychology PhD student working with Priscilla Lui, was selected to receive a 2025 APAGS/Psi Chi Junior Scientist Fellowship. This award recognizes outstanding research-oriented students early in their doctoral training, and provides support for direct research costs.

Grad student Jovani Azpeitia received the 2025 Heritage Research Award. Recipients of this prize receive $2,000 for the costs of conducting research and a certificate will be presented to him at the awards ceremony at the upcoming SPSP Convention on Thursday, February 24, in Chicago, IL. Jovani is mentored by Sapna Cheryan. Jovani also was awarded a Presidential Dissertation Award from the University of Washington, Graduate School and a GSEE Dissertation Year Award, which both provide one quarter of funding for Jovani to focus on writing and completing his dissertation this year.

Annie Xu was one of the grad students on the Applied Research Fellowship team, who worked with stakeholders at King County Department of Natural Resources and Parks to assess accessibility of parks in urban unincorporated areas. Cynthia Levine is her faculty mentor. You can read more about it here: https://csde.washington.edu/news-events/2025-applied-research-fellows-study-accessibility-for-king-county-parks/

Aoi Hunsaker, mentored by Joe Sisneros, was awarded a predoctoral position on the Auditory Training Grant (ANTG) at UW for 2025-2026. This one-year award supports learning new methods in auditory science research and collaboration with laboratories within and cross fields.

The following incoming graduate students received funding awards through the Office of the Provost: Mu-yin Chang (mentored by Lori Zoellner), Venus Rekow (mentored by Lucía Magis-Weinberg), and Chelsea Uddenberg (mentored by Angela Fang).

PHD students Keith Jamison, mentored by Cynthia Levine, Carol Lu, mentored by Ariel Starr, and PSYCAP students Khadijah Abu, Caleb Akana, and Hunter Baril, were all awarded a Graduate School Equity & Excellence (GSEE) Graduate Supplemental Award for the 2025-2026 academic year. This competitive award is based on departmental nominations of students who demonstrate academic merit, financial need, and whose life experiences and/or graduate academic pursuits will contribute significantly to the intellectual and cultural enrichment of departmental programs.

Two students completed the requirements for the Psychology Data Science Option – Lydia Zhang (advised by Sama Ahmed) and Aoi Hunsaker (advised by Joe Sisneros).

Rashed AlRasheed completed the Quantitative minor in psychology in Summer 2025.

Publications

Graduate student Ana Carolina Kodama Cottington and her advisor, professor Yuichi Shoda co-authored a paper published in Autism in Adulthood entitled “The Impact of Autism-Affirming and Autism-Stigmatizing Cues on Autistic Adults’ Camouflaging Efforts,” and can be read here: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/25739581251379187

Mahnoor Hyat, in Jen Forsyth’s lab, published a paper in Psychological Medicine titled Independent Versus Joint Effects of Polygenic or Family-based Schizophrenia Risk in Diverse Ancestry Youth in the ABCD Study. Kate Foster and Jen Forsyth were co-authors. Read the study.

Willem Weertman’s manuscript, Octopus Track Chemosensory Plumes to Find Food, was just published in the Journal of PLoSONE. Dominic Sivitlli and David Gire were co-authors. David Gire is Willem Weertman’s mentor. You can read the manuscript here: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0330262

Sarena Sabine, is second author on a paper published in the Journal of Positive Psychology called Comparing the Well-Being Benefits of Engaging in Two Positive Psychology Interventions: The Noticing Nature Intervention (NNI) vs Three Good Things (3GT). Sarena’s faculty mentor is Brian Flaherty. You can read that paper here: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/8ENMYIHHQEZU46SXWVAD/full?target=10.1080/17439760.2025.2569079

Grad student, Laila Volpe, and assistant professor, Katherine Foster, co-wrote a paper for the Journal of Adolescent Health which was recently reposted on ScienceDirect.com. Title: The Protective Impact of Social Support on the Cascade Rates Between Internalizing Problems and Alcohol Misuse in Adolescence. You can read it here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1054139X25003696

Lori Zoellner, Andrea Stocco, Gabrielle Gauthier, Shivani Pandey, Emma PeConga and Michele A Bedard-Gilligan recently co-authored a paper, that was published by ScienceDirect, titled Remembering and Forgetting: A Dynamic Social Retrieval Theory of Posttraumatic Stress. You can read it here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0005796725001950

Priscilla Lui’s lab also has a new publication in Behavior Therapy (flagship journal of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies), entitled, "State of the Science: Alcohol Use and Acculturation-Related Factors Across Diverse Populations." The paper can be read on https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/ and an open-access post-print is available at https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/fwz8 Coauthors included clinical psychology Ph.D. student, Christine Chang, and several recent UW psychology graduates and current undergraduate students, Clara Rufo (currently a post-bac researcher), Rosa Peterson (currently a Ph.D. student in clinical psychology at the Louisiana State University), and Maria (Luján) Bazzano.

Master Degrees Awarded

Mira Reichman: Summer 2025

Jessica Yu: Summer 2025

Lydia Zhang: Summer 2025

Yuchen Zhao: Summer 2025

Priya Dahiya, Autumn 2025

Fasika Hailu, Autumn 2025

Urmi Pandya, Autumn 2025

Ph.D.'s Awarded

Rashed AlRasheed (Child Clinical; Chair: Shannon Dorsey), Summer 2025

Exploring Determinants and Impacts of Organizational Implementation Constructs in Global Mental Health

Jasmine Awad (Cognition & Perception; Chair: Ione Fine): Autumn 2025

Divided Visual Attention and Fluency in American Sign Language Users: An Experimental Study and Assessment Tool Development

Z Ferguson (Social Psychology and Personality, Chair: Sapna Cheryan): Summer 2025

Workplace Sexual Harassment of Non-Prototypical Women: Cognitive Processes and Legal Outcome

Melissa Gasser (Adult Clinical, Chair: William George): Summer 2025

Depressed and Drinking: A Daily Diary Study of Mood, Alcohol, and Behavioral Activation

Neil Gleason (Child Clinical; Chair: William George): Summer 2025

A Mixed-Methods Examination of HIV Risk in Men Who Have Sex with Men: Effects of Alcohol and Sexual Compulsivity

Jee Hoon Han (Cognition and Perception; Susan Joslyn): Autumn 2025

Psychological Responses to and Acceptance of Medical AI: Comparing Human Provider, AI Provider, and their Collaboration

Diana Mi-Jung Kwon (Adult Clinical; Chair: Vibh Forsythe-Cox): Summer 2025

Identifying Mechanisms of Change in Dialectical Behavior Therapy for Substance Use Disorders (DBT-SUD): A Mixed Methods Examination of Mediators of Substance Use Reduction

K. Manbeck (Experimental Psychology; Chair: Jonathan Kanter) Summer 2025

Intergroup anxiety in a medical student context: A standardized patient study

Emma PeConga (Adult Clinical; Chair: Mary Larimer): Summer 2025

Memory and the #MeToo Movement: Understanding Cognitive Mechanisms of Risk for Post-Traumatic Psychopathology Following Sexual Assault

Ishika Ray (Social Psychology and Personality; Chair: Yuichi Shoda): Autumn 2025

Who is Asian? Challenging Essentialist Categorization Through Scientific Communication

Rebecca Schachtman (Social Psychology and Personality; Chair: Cheryl Kaiser): Summer 2025

How Gender Prototypes Shape Bystander Responses to and Self-Perceptions of Women's Sexual Harassment

Lisa Shimomaeda (Child Clinical; Chair: Lili Lengua): Summer 2025

When Fear Drives Problem Behaviors: An Examination of Temperamental and Environmental Precursors to Externalizing Problems

Michele Smith (Child Clinical; Chair: Lili Lengua and Kevin King): Summer 2025

Emotional and behavioral regulation as mediators of the association between adversity and dysregulated drinking

Frank Song (Adult Clinical; Chair: Mary Larimer): Summer 2025

A Longitudinal Study of Speculative Trading Activities and Health Correlates in Young Adults

Victoria Szydlowski (Adult Clinical; Chair: Mary Larimer): Summer 2025

Microdosing Hallucinogens/Psychedelics: Trends and Practices Among College Students and Young Adults