People | FEND Lab | University of Pittsburgh (2023)

Lab Director

Jennifer Silk, Ph.D.

Email: jss4@pitt.edu

Jennifer Silk is aProfessor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. A 1997 graduate of the University of Virginia,Dr. Silk earned a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychologyin 2002 from Temple University. She completed a pre-doctoral clinical psychology internship and postdoctoral fellowship at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic at the University of Pittsburgh, and joined the University of Pittsburgh faculty in 2005. Dr. Silk was awarded an NIMH Mentored Research Scientist Development Award and a Young Investigator Award from the National Alliance for Research in Schizophrenia and Depression to investigate social and neurobiological mechanisms involved in the intergenerational transmission of depression. Her current research focuses on factors involved in the etiology and treatment of anxiety and depressive disorders in adolescence. She has served as the Principal Investigator on 4 NIH-funded studies investigating trajectories toward anxiety and depression in adolescents and ways to improve treatments for these disorders. As part of this work, she has developed novel methods for assessing emotional reactivity and regulation in adolescence, including ecological momentary assessment methods to sample adolescents’ social and emotional experiences in real time, and neuroimaging paradigms to assess brain responses to social feedback. She has also developed a smartphone-based intervention to improve treatment of child anxiety, which was a winner of the Behavioral Health Patient Empowerment Challenge sponsored by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. Dr. Silk has also been honored for early career contributions to mental health research by the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. Dr. Silk was also elected as a Fellow in the Association for Psychological Science in 2017 in recognition of sustained outstanding contributions to the field of psychological science.

Affiliated Faculty

Caroline Oppenheimer, Ph.D.

After earning a PhD in Clinical Child Psychology from the University of Denver in 2014, Dr. Oppenheimer moved to Pittsburgh to complete a clinical psychology internship at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic of UPMC. She obtained postdoctoral training through the federally funded Child and Adolescent Mental Health Research training program at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine prior to joining the Department of Psychiatry faculty.Dr. Oppenheimer’s current research focuses on how neurobehavioral and interpersonal vulnerabilities contribute tomood problems, such as depression and suicidal behaviors, in adolescent youth. With funding from a K01 career development award from the National Institute of Mental Health, she is testingthe hypothesis that neural sensitivity to social rejection, when occurring in the presence of peer rejection, increases risk for issues in adolescent girls.

Lauren Bylsma, Ph.D.

Lauren M. Bylsma is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry with a secondary appointment in Psychology. She is also a licensed Clinical Psychologist. She completed her PhD at the University of South Florida in 2012 and completed her internship at the VA Puget Sound in Seattle. Her research focuses on understanding emotional functioning and the course of depression using a variety of neural, psychophysiological, experiential, behavioral, and daily life measures. For her recently completed K01 she examined emotional functioning in youth at high familial risk for depression using neural and daily life measures of emotional processing, reactivity, and regulation. She is currently funded by a NARSAD Young Investigator Award where she is examining gut microbiome characteristics in adolescents varying in depression symptoms and familial risk, including the influence of reward and stress systems on the link between gut microbiome and depression.

Judith Morgan, Ph.D.

Dr. Judith Morgan completed her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at the University of Delaware in 2010. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Psychology. Dr. Jennifer Silk previously served as a consultant for her NIMH K01 award and currently serves as a mentor for her NARSAD Young Investigator Grant studying neural response to novel, social stimuli in shy and inhibited preschool age children.

Mary Woody, Ph.D.

Mary Woody, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Woody received her B.S. in psychology and women & gender studies from the University of Miami and her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Binghamton University (SUNY). She completed her doctoral clinical internship at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic before completing an NIMH T32-funded postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the current recipient of an NIMH Career Development Award (K23), which tests if a novel brain-based measure of affect-biased attention, as measured by steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs), can be 1) used to predict future adolescent depression and 2) provide neural feedback about affect-biased attention in order to modify it and buffer mood reactivity. In addition, her past and ongoing research projects have examined 1) cognitive, physiological, and genetic markers of risk for youth depression, 2) multi-method assessment of the role of affect-biased attention in the development and recurrence of depression, and 3) individual differences in neural and behavioral functioning that underlie response to neurocognitive interventions for internalizing disorders.

Post-Doctoral Scholar

KieraJames, PhD

Kiera James, PhDis a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. James earned her B.A. in Psychology with a minor in Spanish from Swarthmore College in 2015 and her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Binghamton University (SUNY) in 2021. She completed her clinical internship through the University of Washington School of Medicine at Seattle Children’s Hospital. Her research takes a multi-modal, integrative approach to identify mechanisms underlying the development and maintenance of suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs) and non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) in youth, with a particular focus on interpersonal factors. Dr. James is the current recipient of an F32 NRSA from the NIMH, which examines several biobehavioral processes involved in social communication during parent-daughter interaction, and whether alterations in these dyadic processes predict future 1) day-to-day social connectedness, and 2) STBs.

Graduate Students

QuyenDo, M.S.

Quyen Do is a graduate student in the clinical-developmental psychology PhD program at Pitt. Quyen graduated from Yale University in 2016 with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology. Her research interests focus on how interpersonal relationships and emotion regulation processes interact during adolescent development. She is particularly interested in using ecological momentary assessment measures in order to capture the socio-contextual environments in which adolescents develop and implement both interpersonal and regulatory skills which may contribute to adolescent psychopathology.

Kirsten McKone​​, M.S.

Kirsten McKone is a doctoral studentin the clinical-developmental psychologyprogram at the University of Pittsburgh.Kirsten graduated from Saint Olaf College in 2008with a B.A. in music.After graduation, she worked in education reform in California before deciding to pursue a graduate degree in psychology.Her research interests include risk and resilience to psychopathology,temperament,parent-child interaction,psychophysiology, andadvanced statistical methods. She is particularly interested in how parents interact with their children in ways that either exacerbate risk or promote resilience to psychopathology.

Emily Hutchinson, B.S.

Emily is a doctoral student in the clinical-developmental psychology program at the University of Pittsburgh. She graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 2017 with a B.S. in Psychology. Her research interests focus on how peer-related processes (i.e. rejection, social media) contribute to the development of adolescent suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Her research utilizes multimodal assessments, such as neuroimaging and ecological momentary assessment, to better understand the dynamics of adolescent suicidal thoughts and behaviors and peer experiences.

Melanie Grad-Freilich, B.S.

Melanie is a doctoral student in the clinical-developmental psychology program at the University of Pittsburgh. She graduated from Yale University in 2019 with a B.S. in Psychology in the Neuroscience track. She is particularly interested in how stressful life events and adversity affect emotion regulation and executive functioning in ways that lead to depression, anxiety and suicidality during childhood and adolescence.

ZelalKilic, B.S.

Zelal is a first-year joint Clinical–Developmental Psychology Ph.D. student at the University ofPittsburgh. Her primary mentor is Dr. Jennifer Silk, and Dr. Choukas-Bradley is her secondary mentor. Zelal graduated from ConnecticutCollege in 2022 where she double majored in psychology and computer science. At the intersection of these two fields of study, shebecame interested in investigating the effects of digital media on developmental mental health and pursued multiple projects investigatingdifferent types of online interactions. Later, she worked as a project coordinator for the WIFI Initiative at University of North Carolina atChapel Hill where she conducted research on social media use, peer relationships andsuicidality. Zelal is now broadly interested in investigating the longitudinal links between online and offline interpersonal interactions, andself-harm behaviors and suicidality.

FEND Lab Manager

Sasha Hofman, B.S.

Sasha Hofman graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 2022 with a bachelor's in Psychology and a minor in History. During her undergraduate career, she served as a research assistant in the FEND Lab under Dr. Jennifer Silk and in the Kid's Thinking (KiT) Lab under Dr. Melissa Libertus. In the KiT Lab, she completed an honors thesis, which examined the impact of parental use of hand gestures in the development of early childhood spatial skills. She plans to pursue a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and is particularly interested in the relationship between parental emotion socialization and the development of anxiety and depression throughout adolescence.

Teen SCREEN Study Coordinator

Alexandra Petryczenko, B.A., B.S.

Alexandra graduated from the University of Delaware in 2021, where she received her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, her Bachelor of Science in Neuroscience, and a minor in Public Health. She gained two years of clinical research experience with dyadic relationships and emotion regulation strategies during her time at UD. Alex’s broad research interests focus on sex differences in anxious youth and adolescents and the neural substrates involved in these processes. She is also interested in preventative interventions for adolescents at risk for developing depression and other internalizing disorders. She plans to pursue a doctorate in clinical psychology in the future.

Research Assistant

Ken Goodrich, B.S

Ken graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 2021, where they received their bachelor’s in psychology, with focuses in anthropology & philosophy of medicine. They served as an undergraduate research assistant in Dr. Jeffery Cohn’s Affect Analysis Group, and currently hold a position as a certified FACS (facial action coding system) coder and research assistant. They served as the coordinator for the Teen Brain Online Study, a study examining how the teen brain responds to peer feedback on social media. They plan to purse a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and is interested in studying the integration of evidenced based treatments and affective computing in mental health mobile applications.

Data Manager

Marcus Min, M.S.

Marcus graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a Master of Science in Information Science. Marcus has experience implementing complex data projects with a focus on collecting, parsing, managing, analyzing and visualizing large sets of data to turn information into insights using multiple platforms. He loves the challenge of dealing with data on a daily basis and understands how to apply technologies to solve data related problems and to develop innovative data solutions.

Undergraduate Students

Samantha Wert

Amelia Lint

Corrine Migliazza

Sri Mutukula

Erica Huynh

Margaret Lynch

Meg Cavanaugh

PerpetuaBuadoo

Dev Chopra

Anvi Joshi

Enoch Du

Former Graduate Students

Dana Rosen, Ph.D.

Dana Rosen is a post-doctoral scholarat Alpert Brown Medical School. Here, she does a mixture of clinical and research work. Specifically, she is working in the Adult Partial HospitalizationProgram where they treat adults with a range of presenting mental health concerns using an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy approach.

StefanieSequeira, M.S.

Stefanie is a graduate student in the clinical-developmental psychology PhD program at Pitt. Stefanie graduated from the University of Maryland in 2014 with a B.S. in Psychology and a minor in Neuroscience. Her research interests focus on how peer relationships interact with brain development in adolescence and contribute to the development and maintenance of social anxiety.She is particularly interested in the role thatpeer rejection and susceptibility to peer influence play in socialdevelopment and psychopathology, and how social media use is changing how we view and study peer relationships in children and adolescents.

Rosalind Butterfield, PhD.

Rosalind Butterfield is a graduate student in the clinical-developmental psychology PhD program at Pitt. Rosalind graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism & Mass Communications & Psychology. Generally, her research addresses child emotion regulation and brain development. She utilizesneuroimagingand laboratory observation methods to assess theinfluences of parenting on neural function in typical and atypical development in children and adolescents.​

Former Affiliated Post-Doctoral Scholar

​Jessica L. Hamilton, Ph.D.

Jessica L. Hamilton, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Rutgers University.Check out her website here:thehamiltonlab.org