I am a third year master’s-through-Ph.D. student in the Department of Human Development and Family Science at Virginia Tech, with a concentration in Child and Adolescent Development. I am hoping to attain a professorship at a teaching university after receiving my doctoral degree.
My master’s thesis is titled Mothers’ and Fathers’ Differential Discussion of Emotions with their School-Age Children. This work is being conducted in partnership with the Children’s Emotions Lab, housed within the HDFS department. My research interests center around emotion socialization: the role that gender plays in parents’ beliefs, attitudes and rules about children’s emotions and the ways they transmit those rules to their children.
I am also interested in the ways that social media and technology use relate to cognitive and social development. I am working with the Cognitive Aging and Translational Science (CATS) lab in the HDFS department to examine the role of smartphone presence and interaction on cognitive performance.
I attended the College of Charleston in South Carolina for my undergraduate studies. I received a Bachelor of Science in Psychology and a Bachelor of Arts in French and Francophone studies. I spent a semester in Lille, France during my sophomore year.