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Meet the Lab
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Nancy Snidman received her Ph.D. in Learning from the University of California, Los Angeles. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in the Psychology Department at Harvard University she became Research Director for the Infant Study at Harvard where she conducted research for over two decades specializing in the psychophysiological correlates of infant temperament. She is author with Jerome Kagan of The Long Shadow of Temperament (2004) which traces their 25 years of longitudinal studies of behaviorally inhibited and uninhibited children. She is also Director of EEG Research for TRANSCEND (Treatment, Research And NeuroSCience Evaluation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders) at Massachusetts General Hospital. The focus of this program is to develop profiles of measures for early identification of autism. Dr. Snidman's interests include biological correlates of temperament and individual differences, autism, and socio-emotional development. Her research has included typically developing children as well as studies into the relationship between psychobiology and psychopathology with a number of clinical populations including children of parents who have panic attacks or depression, and children with depression, burn trauma and children of international adoptions.
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Nadine Fink received her Ph.D. in perinatal and clinical Psychology at the University of Basel, Switzerland and has had four years of psychotherapy training at the University Psychiatric Clinic in Basel, Switzerland.
From 2003 ? 2008 she has worked as a clinical psychologist and as a researcher in the University Hospital of Basel, Switzerland, in the departments for psychosomatics and for gynaecological social medicine and psychosomatics. In 2008 she started a postdoctoral fellowship at the Child Development Unit, Children?s Hospital Boston. She has several certificates; e.g in the NICU Network Neurobehavioural Scale (NNNS), (Tronick and Lester, Boston) and in Parent?s Sensitivity Training, University Fribourg, Switzerland.
Dr. Fink's interests include perinatal maternal / fetal well-being, early child development and infant mental health. Her research includes studying the interrelationship between stress as well as psychopathology and pregnancy outcome as well as fetal neuro-behaviour. Currently, she is looking at the interaction styles between depressed / non depressed mothers and their infants in naturalistic home observations and is involved in a study examining the stability of coping and memory for social stress in infants.
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Cindy Liu received her Ph.D in Clinical Psychology from the University of Oregon and completed her clinical internship at Harvard Medical School/McLean Hospital. Currently, she is a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Medical School/Children's Hospital as part of a NIMH funded Clinical Research Training Program. Since her undergraduate work at the University of Minnesota, she has been interested in the role of culture on emotion development. This interest has expanded into the study of basic emotion processes and the development of clinical interventions for ethnic minority children and families. As part of her postdoctoral fellowship, she is continuing to work on her dissertation data set which examines the emotion socialization process among Chinese American and European America mother-child dyads and how the groups compare when it comes to emotion expression, regulation, physiology, and externalizing and internalizing symptomatology. Dr. Liu is also involved in prevention research with at-risk youth in the Boston public middle schools through the McLean Hospital/RALLY program.
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I graduated from The University of Massachusetts in Boston with a Bachelor's Degree in Psychology. After I graduated I received my certification in infant/toddler and preschool teaching. I spent a year and a half working as an infant/toddler teacher at The Children's Center at Milton Academy. I am now working as a research study assistant in Dr. Tronick's lab. I love spending time with my nieces and nephews whose extraordinary capabilities have inspired me to learn more about the social, emotional and cognitive processes of children. Our current research is focusing on infants' abilities to remember a social-emotional event.
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Emily Mott received a Bachelor's Degree in Psychology from The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. After graduating, Emily worked for a year as an Intervention Specialist providing behavior therapy to children diagnosed with Autism. Her interest in the field of Autism then led Emily to join the TRANSCEND Research Program at Massachusetts General Hospital as a Study Research Coordinator. There she gained experience administering cognitive, behavioral, and language assessments to children with and without Autism. She also helped children to complete the study procedures which included MRI, MEG, and EEG. Emily is excited to be part of the Child Development Unit and hopes to learn more about the development of typical children. In her spare time, she enjoys traveling, playing volleyball, and baking.
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Fernanda Lucchese received her B.A. in developmental psychology from Duke University and her M.A. in psychology, with a concentration in biopsychology, from New York University. Her master's thesis focused on the early trends of language development in Latino toddlers from different national origins. She holds certificates in early childhood education and health policy from Duke University. She has recently joined the Clinical Psychology PhD Program at University of Massachusetts Boston, during which Dr. Ed Tronick will serve as her mentor. Fernanda was born in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and, from an early age, has enjoyed travelling and learning about different cultures. She is passionate about working with young children. After spending two years working with immigrant mothers and their infants in New York City she has developed great interest for cross-cultural developmental issues. She is also interested in developmental neuropsychology and plans to pursue this field as a clinician and researcher.
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Akhila received degrees in Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering and Biological Sciences at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science in Pilani, India. She subsequently received a Master's in 2006 in Creative Arts in Therapy specializing in Dance/Movement Therapy at Drexel University in Philadelphia where she received an award in recognition of outstanding overall achievement and scholarship. She recently completed a Master's program in Applied Psychology at Annamalai University in Tamil Nadu, India. Akhila is fluent in English, Hindi, Tamil, and Marathi. While at Drexel, she interned at the Terry Children's Psychiatric Center as a therapist for behaviorally and emotionally disturbed children. After graduating from Drexel, she worked at the Center for Eating Disorders in Maryland as a Movement Therapist. She then practiced as a consulting Arts-Based Therapist in Mumbai, India. She is a registered Dance Therapist and is a member of the American Dance Therapy Association. She is also trained in Bharathanatyam, an Indian Classical Dance form, as a performer and instructor. She is currently pursuing the Clinical Psychology Ph.D. Program at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and Dr. Ed Tronick is her mentor. She is interested in studying emotional development in young children with a special emphasis on the impact of stressors.
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Karim grew up internationally and settled in the US in 1995. He received his BA from Wheaton College (Massachusetts) and MA in psychology from Adelphi University (New York). Currently, he is pursuing his PhD in clinical psychology with an emphasis in neuropsychology in Fielding Graduate University?s doctoral program, where Dr. Ed Tronick is his advisor. His research experience includes working in a radiology laboratory under Dr. Nahum Goldberg at Beth-Israel Deaconess Medical Center/Harvard Medical School where he earned co-authorships on several successful studies focusing on developing image-guided, minimally invasive therapies for malignant diseases. Additionally, he received a research assistantship at the Derner Institute of Psychology (Adelphi U.) and contributed to a project examining the use of Dr. Wilma Bucci?s Referential Activity measures on recall of emotionally powerful life experiences. His clinical experience has centered on using multimodal psychotherapy techniques for treating developmental disabilities populations who have secondary psychiatric diagnoses. He currently works as a supervisor and clinician at FEGS?s Health Care Center, which provides a variety of clinical services for over 800 people with developmental disabilities in New York City. In addition to psychology, he enjoys cooking, making music, and traveling with his wife. He is excited to be part of the Tronick laboratory and hopes to contribute in our understanding of how environmental stressors and endophenotypes impact parent-infant interactions and in turn infants? neuropsychological and/or socioemotional development.
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Katherine Kus is an undergraduate student at Northeastern University, working towards a Bachelor of Science degree in Behavioral Neuroscience. She became involved with Children's Hospital through her volunteer work on the Surgical/Transplant ward last year. Inspired by this experience Katherine sought to gain additional experience here at the Child Development Unit through Northeastern's Cooperative Education program. Katherine aspires to apply her fascination with the worlds of psychology and biology to a rewarding career working with children in the future. Outside of work, she is a member of the Northeastern Women's Squash team and enjoys other outdoor activities such as running, hiking, and biking.
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I am an undergraduate student at Northeastern University, pursuing a Bachelor of Science Degree in Psychology. Through Northeastern University's Cooperative Education program I have the opportunity to intern with the Child Development Unit on their current research project and continue my knowledge and learning of child psychology and research. I have always loved working with children and hope to combine that with my interest in human behavioral development now and in the future.
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