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Although we have to celebrate remotely, we are so proud of our Child & Family lab members who are moving on from the lab and taking the next steps in their career. Cheers to Erin Glackin, Joi Bryant, Janie Park, Sarah Guilaume, Nina Bharadwaj, Yayu Du, Celeste Pinto, Lauren Fleming, and Mollie Keyser. We are so grateful for the many important ways you have contributed to the work we do in the lab and the sense of community you have brought to the team. 

Janie Park, Sarah Guilaume, Nina Bharadwaj, Yayu Du, Celeste Pinto, Lauren Fleming and Mollie Keyser made up a team of our accomplished graduating seniors!  Each was invaluable in supporting both the daily and big-picture goals and projects of the Child and Family Lab.

To feature just some of their accomplishments during their time at Tulane, Janie graduated with a Bachelors of Science in Psychology with Honors and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics. She was awarded the Rosa Cahn Hartman prize for her excellence in her academic performance and research activities in Psychology. Janie will be completing her Master’s in Behavioral Science at Tulane this Fall.  Sarah graduated with a Bachelors of Science in Psychology with a minor in Liberal Arts Management. She received the Faculty Award for Applied Psychological Research and will be pursuing her PsyD at Widener’s Clinical Psychology Program with a specialization in Neuropsychology this Fall. Nina graduated Summa Cum Laude with majors in Psychology and Dance. She is currently working as a medical scribe at an allergy and asthma clinic to obtain patient care experience and plans to apply for Physician Assistant master’s programs. Yayu graduated with a Bachelors of Science in Psychology and will be attending the University of Rochester this Fall to complete her master’s in Mental Health counseling. The University of Rochester awarded her the Dean’s Award scholarship for Master’s Study as a result of both her academic achievement and potential. Celeste Pinto graduated with a Bachelor’s of Science in Psychology and History. She will be continuing on to earn her Master’s of Science degree in Behavioral Health on the intervention course path at Tulane and plans to attend medical school in the future. Lauren Fleming graduated Summa Cum Laude with a major in Psychology and minors in Public Health and Social Innovation/Social Entrepreneurship. She received the Aaron Hartman Medal for excellence in Psychology and plans to pursue her PhD in Clinical Psychology in the future. Lastly, Mollie Keyser graduated Magna Cum Laude with her Bachelor of Science in Psychology. She is excited to start her Occupational Therapy Doctorate program at Tufts University this summer.

We are also proud to see Joi Bryant move forward on her path to pursue her career goals of earning her MD as an Obstetrician and Gynecologist. Joi spent the last year teaching elementary students and still dedicated her after-school time to being a Child Team member in our Mom Power project. Joi was accepted into post-baccalaureate programs in Louisiana, California, and Mississippi and will be leaving the Gray Lab to further her medical science studies. Congratulations, Joi!

Finally, we are incredibly proud to see our fifth-year doctoral student, Erin Glackin graduate and head off to her internship site at the University of Denver’s MHCD Infant Mental Health Track. Erin will be missed as a leader in the lab, but we know she is headed for big things!

This February, Elsa Obus, M.S.,  a fourth-year graduate student in the Child & Family Lab, collaborated with her colleague Abril Harris, MSW, a doctoral student at Boston College School of Social Work, to present at The Teachers College of Columbia’s Winter Roundtable. This professional continuing education conference focuses on cultural topics in psychology, social work, and education.  Elsa and Abril have both researched legal socialization– or how people develop their beliefs and attitudes about the legal system and its actors. In particular, they have examined how Black families and justice-involved families communicate about the police. At the Roundtable, Elsa and Abril led a discussion to help educators be aware of their roles as legal socialization agents and support their students in a trauma-informed way. We are so excited about the important work to which Elsa and Abril are contributing.

This February one of our Gray lab senior undergraduate Research Assistants, Yayu Du,  presented her research examining associations between neighborhood violence, maternal depression, and child negative affect. Her research used both maternal self-report and ArcGIS, a geographic information system, to capture neighborhood violence. Yayu’s work to include ArcGIS geocoding in her research is an exciting frontier that enriches the current data. Congratulations, Yayu!

This fall, Child and Family Lab senior, Lauren Fleming, was awarded $2,700 through the Newcomb College Institute Student Grant to fund research. Lauren’s funding is to support the coding of the Insightfulness Assessment data from the Child & Family Lab’s Parent Child and Coping Study. The Insightfulness Assessment follows a procedure of structured interviews with mothers about their children based on videotaped segments of mother-child interactions (Oppenheim & Koren-Karie, 2002). Dr. Nina Koren-Karie, a researcher at the

University of Haifa, created the Insightfulness Assessment (IA) and therefore codes the interview transcriptions. Coding the interviews is a time and cost consuming process, therefore, the grant funding will go towards coding more of our IA interviews. Lauren is using the IA coding data in her thesis project seeking to address the gaps present in the research on intergenerational transmission of adversity by examining key regulatory processes in early childhood as well as the potential buffering power of maternal insightfulness. She hopes that having more IA coded data available to the lab team in the future will allow for more research to be produced that examines the the potential protective aspect of maternal insightfulness as a strength within the parent-child relationship. Lauren plans on defending her thesis this Spring. We are proud of her hard work and excited to see it unfold!

This October, lab members Janie Park and Hannah Swerbenski traveled to Portland, Oregon to present Gray Lab data findings at the Society for the Study of Human Development Conference.  The poster they presented, “Mothers’ PTSD and Depression are Associated with Discordant Reporting of her Young Child’s Trauma Exposure”, examined the efficacy of different kinds of assessments that capture preschool-aged children’s Potentially Traumatic Experiences (PTE) by looking at how parental psychopathology may impact reporting of PTE exposure for one’s child. This poster was the result of scholarly teamwork between Janie Park (undergraduate RA), Hannah Swerbenski, B.S., Erin Glacklin, M.S., and Sarah Gray, PhD.

During the last week of June, the Child and Family lab had the honor of hosting a team of researchers and clinicians from the University of Michigan.  The Michigan team spent three days training Dr. Gray’s child and family lab members, Tulane School Psychology graduate students, and other community providers in the Mom Power program so that it can be adapted and implemented to serve the New Orleans community. 

Mom Power is an evidence-based intervention program that aims to support families who are facing adversity and stress through the challenges of caring for young children. Aligning with the Child and Family lab values, Mom Power is a strength-based, nurturing approach to promoting transgenerational resilience for mothers and children. 

The training was incredibly informative and powerful and we are so grateful for the Michigan team for bringing their knowledge to us all in New Orleans! A big thank you to our wonderful trainers: Dr. Kate Rosenblum, PhD, Dr. Maria Muzik, MD, MS, Melisa Schuster MSW, CAADC,  and Julie Ribaudo, MSW, ACSW, Infant Mental Health Specialist. We look forward to putting our Mom Power knowledge to action in the coming years.

This June, Joi Bryant and Sarah Guillaume, Child and Family Lab undergraduate research assistants, presented their research posters at the 2019 Louisiana Psychology Association convention. Joi’s poster, “Harsh Parenting among African-American Families: The Carrier of Family and Community Trauma,” examined the associations between maternal history of child sexual abuse, interpersonal violence exposure, community violence, and maternal use of harsh discipline among a predominantly low-income African American sample of 4-5 year olds and their families. Sarah’s Poster, “Racial Socialization of Black Children: The Influences of Child Sex and Maternal Arrest,” examined racial socialization of preschool aged children in the context of maternal arrest. Both of them did a fabulous job and Sarah won best undergraduate poster for original research!  Graduate student, Justin Carreras, has previously won this award in the graduate category. We are excited that we can continue to share our research at this conference.

Spring 2019 was bittersweet here at the Gray Lab as we celebrated and then said goodbye to many important and wonderful members of our team!

Congratulations to Peter Balcke, Samantha Perry, Chloe Christian and Zoe Cebulash, our accomplished graduating seniors!  Each had an important role in keeping the Child and Family Lab running successfully. 

To highlight just some of their accomplishments during their time at Tulane, Zoe graduated with  Magna Cum Laude, Chloe Cristian graduated with a successful senior project “Maternal Arrest and Its Implications for Maternal-Child Mental Health,” and Sam Perry graduated Cum Laude as a Newcomb Scholar, successfully defending her Psychology and Neuroscience honors thesis: “The Association Between Maternal Adverse Childhood Experiences and Mother-Child Physiological Synchrony.” Sam also received the Newcomb College Institute Award for Exceptional Character, The Rosa Cahn Hartman Award in Psychology, The Neuroscience Faculty Award, an Oak Wreath Award, and the Newcomb Internship Grant Award. 

We are also proud to see Justin Carreras, fifth year doctoral student, heads off to Momentous Institute in Dallas for his internship year. 

Lastly, we congratulate our incredibly talented lab manager Hannah Swerbenski as she begins her PhD in Developmental Psychology at Rochester University. You will be missed! 

The LAMP Scholars Program, a collaboration between the Louis-Stokes Louisiana Alliance for Minority Participation (LS-LAMP) and Tulane’s Center for Engaged Learning and Teaching (CELT), seeks to increase minority STEM research engagement at Tulane University. Joi Bryant, a Gray lab senior and LAMP Scholar, has been working closely under the advising of Gray Lab graduate student Chloe Pickett on a research project examining childhood sexual abuse among African American mothers. 

Joi presented the culmination of her project, a poster entitled “Childhood Sexual Abuse and Intimate Partner Violence: It Harms More than the African American Mother,” at the 13th Annual School of Science and Engineering Research Day. 

We are happy to have had the opportunity to share Joi’s wonderful work with the Tulane community!

The Gray Lab was strongly represented at the 2019 Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) Biennial Meeting. Dr. Gray chaired a paper symposium entitled Early Adversity, Biology, and Behavior: Examining Biological Consequences and Contingencies of Early Life Stress.  In this symposium, Dr. Gray presented her paper, “Protective Effects of Parasympathetic Activity in Violence-exposed Preschoolers: Sex-specific Associations with Behavior Problems,” which was co-authored by current graduate students Erin Glackin and Ginny Hatch, and former Tulane Child and Family Lab Research Coordinator Rebecca Lipschutz.

Lab members Justin Carreras, Hannah Swerbenski, Erin Glackin, Ginny Hatch, and Elsa Obus also presented posters at the conference, including “Intergenerational Transmission of Self-Regulation: Mediation through Mothers’ Responses to Children’s Negative Emotionality,” “Emerging Verbal Ability in a Low-Income Sample: Examining Maternal Cognitive Stimulation and Cool Self-Regulation,” and “A Person-Centered Approach to Violence Exposure and Behavioral Outcomes Among Preschoolers.”

Dr. Gray was also honored with the prestigious Early Career Research Contributions Award at the SRCD Member Meeting and Awards Ceremony. More information on Dr. Gray’s Award can be found in our post here.