Developmental Recent Graduates

(Ph.D, 2022)

Cindy completed her PhD in Developmental Psychology under the supervision of Dr. Toby Mintz in 2022. Her researched syntactic development and word learning, particularly how linguistic and nonlinguistic cues might influence these processes. Her dissertation investigated how young children ages 3-5 use disfluencies in speech to make predictions about syntactic structures. She is currently a consultant at ZS Associates.

(Ph.D, 2024)

Helen completed her PhD in Developmental Psychology in 2024 under the supervision of Dr. Toby Mintz. During her time at USC, she published several papers examining statistical learning in both infants and adults. Her dissertation focused on the cognitive mechanisms underlying statistical learning in infants and adult second language learners, specifically exploring how language structure and bilingualism influence the detection of statistical regularities. Helen is currently a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia, where she is continuing her research on bilingualism and early language acquisition with Dr. Janet Werker and Dr. Alexis Black.

(Ph.D, 2024)

Vicky completed her Ph.D. in Psychology at USC and worked with Dr. Henrike Moll. She is interested in children’s social cognition. Specifically, she wants to explore how children understand others’ intentions and beliefs, as well as their influences on subsequent behaviors.  She is currently a Game User Research at Activision Blizzard.

(Ph.D, 2022)

Dr. Elly Pueschel worked with Henrike Moll, Santiago Morales, and Mary Helen Immordino-Yang. She graduated from USC in 2022. Dr. Elly Pueschel is a Senior Children’s Media Researcher at the Center for Scholars & Storytellers @ UCLA. Managing projects for industry leading clients such as Youtube Kids and Fred Rogers Productions, she uses her background in child development and mixed-methods research to empower creators with the tools to leverage media to support young children’s positive and healthy development.

(Postdoc, 2024)

Xiaoye Xu was a Postdoctoral Scholar working with Dr. Santiago Morales. She received her Ph.D. in Family and Human Development, with specialization in Measurement and Statistical Analysis from Arizona State University, working with Drs. Tracy Spinrad and Nancy Eisenberg. Xiaoye received her M.A. in Social Psychology from San Francisco State University, and her B.A. in Psychology from Smith College. She is interested in examining the relations between parental behaviors and children’s self-regulation, potential mediators and moderators in the relations, and outcomes of self-regulation like children’s prosocial behavior or psychopathology. She is also interested in using a multi-method approach including questionnaire, behavioral, physiological, and neuroimaging methods to study regulatory processes and related outcomes across development. Her dissertation was a meta-analysis on bidirectional relations between parenting behaviors and children’s effortful control. She is now an Assistant Professor at SUNY Cortland.

(Ph.D, 2019)

Sarah is a recent graduate from USC who worked primarily with Dr. David Schwartz but also interacted frequently with JoAnn Farver. Sarah was a very productive scholar while at USC, publishing multiple papers that examined aggression, victimization, and popularity in adolescent peer groups. Her dissertation (which has now lead to two publications) explored the role of gossip and rumor spreading among popular adolescents and also identified high status victims of bullying.  Sarah is currently a NIH funded post-doctoral researcher with a research group at Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands). She also holds and affiliation with the INVEST Research Flagship Center/Psychology at the University of Turku.