Current Members

Principal Investigator
dsaxbe@usc.edu

I first developed a love of academia as a kid growing up in the small town of Oberlin, Ohio, where I spent most of high school attempting to impersonate an Oberlin College student. I went east for college at Yale University, where I double-majored in English and Psychology, and then west for graduate school at UCLA. As a graduate student, I explored how everyday marital functioning shaped couples’ cortisol patterns at the Center for the Everyday Lives of Families. Post-Ph.D, I completed my clinical internship at a veteran’s hospital in LA, and then received an NRSA post-doctoral fellowship to work with Gayla Margolin on the USC Family Studies Project. Since coming to USC, I have studied the association between family conflict and adolescent development, including cortisol patterns and neural responses to social and emotional stimuli. I’m currently collecting data for a new study, the HATCH study, which follows couples from pregnancy to postpartum and measures their hormonal and neural responses to parenthood. My work is unified by an interest in how relationship contexts influence health, especially during critical life junctures like the transition through puberty and the transition into parenthood. In a former life, I was an aficionado of the local indie rock scene in LA. Now my most adventurous hobby is reading, and I can usually be found at home with my two kids and my husband Dan, a music producer.

Lab Manager
vavala@usc.edu

Gabriella joined the NEST Lab as a lab manager in the summer of 2024. Prior to joining the lab, she earned her B.A. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, and her Master of Public Health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Broadly, Gabriella is interested in how early life stress and resilience factors interact to affect a person’s long-term health and well-being.

Lab Manager
ekim7033@usc.edu

Lizzy Kim is a fourth-year psychology undergraduate student with a minor in Health and Nutrition at USC. Her research interests revolve around exploring family dynamics by closely examining interpersonal relationships between couples or between a parent and child.

Postdoctoral Researcher
agvaccar@usc.edu 

Anthony studies the ways neuroscience can be used to understand complex and conflicting feelings, the sense that we “do not know” how we feel, and how these experiences affect well-being. He is also interested in how we process and  adapt to co-occurring positive and negative aspects of major life changes. He received his PhD in Brain and Cognitive Science from USC working with Dr. Jonas Kaplan and Dr. Antonio Damasio. Before that, he received a MRes in Developmental Neuroscience and Psychopathology through UCL and Yale Child Study Center. You can read more about his work at anthonygvaccaro.com

Graduate Student
sicarden@usc.edu

Sofi is a second-year graduate student in the USC Clinical Science program. Her current research interests include (1) how early-life risk and resilience factors impact perinatal development and (2) exploring the neuroendocrine markers that predict sensitive parenting behaviors during the postpartum period. She received a B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2016. After graduating, Sofi spent two years working as an IRTA fellow in Dr. Ellen Leibenluft’s group at the National Institutes of Mental Health, studying the developmental trajectory and treatment of childhood irritability.

Graduate Student
eaviv@usc.edu

Lizzie started the Clinical Science doctoral program at USC in 2020. Her current research interests include how the transition to parenthood affects couples’ relationship dynamics, both behaviorally and physiologically. Her interests stem from her prior research experiences studying the transition to motherhood through a developmental lens with Dr. Aurelie Athan at Columbia University, as well as studying the relationship between parenting dynamics and toxic stress in infancy with Dr. Miguelina German at Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx.

Graduate Student
gleon@usc.edu

Gabe is a second-year PhD student in Clinical Science at USC (started Fall 2021). Broadly, he studies interpersonal dynamics within families and close relationships – with a specific focus on stress. Namely, he is interested in 1) how close relationships within the family system serve to regulate stress and scaffold child development, and 2) how relationships themselves may deteriorate because of chronic stress exposure and trauma. He hopes to conduct research that informs personalized, family-focused interventions for marginalized communities suffering from trauma and chronic stress. You can read more about his work at https://gabrielleon.me/

Graduate Student
waizman@usc.edu

Yael Waizman is a third-year Clinical Science Ph.D. student at USC. Her research focuses on the neural correlates of emotion recognition and regulation, particularly how they relate to mental health during significant life transitions, such as becoming a parent, transitioning to adulthood, and starting early schooling. She is also interested in studying the impacts family environments and stress have on the brain and socioemotional development more broadly. Prior to joining the NeuroEndocrinology of Social Ties Lab, she worked as a lab manager in Dr. Jennifer Silvers’ lab at UCLA researching how early caregiving adversity, environmental instability, and transitional milestones impact emotion regulation and wellbeing across development.

Graduate Student
pnewsome@usc.edu

Phil, a first-year doctoral student in the Clinical Science program, applies neuroscience and computational methods to study developmental consequences of high-level or persistent stress. In addition, he is interested in bidirectional parent-child influences on socioemotional development. Phil earned his undergraduate degree from St. Mary’s College of Maryland in 2020 and his master’s from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2021. He also completed a two-year fellowship with Dr. Daniel Pine at the National Institute of Mental Health, focusing on threat anticipation and decision conflict in kids with anxiety disorders.

Research Assistant
Jasmine is an undergraduate senior double-majoring in Psychology and Business Administration. She is interested in studying the connections between close relationships and associations with mental health. She is also greatly interested in speech and language’s intersection with mental health, particularly with special education students. After graduating this upcoming year, Jasmine hopes to pursue a graduate degree as well.