APA Science Student Council

Hallie Bregman, Chair (2010-2012)
University of Miami
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Research Focus: Clinical Science
Hallie is a fourth-year graduate student in the Child Clinical Psychology Program at the University of Miami. Hallie is interested in research that aims to understand parent-youth relationships and family dynamics. She currently is involved in a research project investigating parental acceptance and family functioning in families with lesbian, gay, or bisexual adolescents and young adults. She also has a significant interest in quantitative methodology, including advanced structural equation modeling.


Joshua Carp (2011-2013)
University of Michigan
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Research Focus: Cognitive Science
Josh is a doctoral candidate in Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Michigan. He studies the effects of aging on perception and memory using psychophysics, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and electroencephalography. Josh also works on neuroimaging methods, with a focus on multivariate decoding of mental states and analysis of model uncertainty.



Gina Fernandez (2011-2013)
George Mason University
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Research Focus: Biopsychology
Gina is a fourth year student in the doctoral program for Biopsychology at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. She conducts research under the guidance of Dr. Robert Smith, and uses animal models of drug reward to focus on the effects of adolescent nicotine exposure on learning and memory mechanisms. Currently, she is exploring the interaction between molecular markers of adolescent memory induction and drug reward to determine whether addictive behaviors early in life are a result of increased reward susceptibility, stronger drug- cue memory formation or both. Gina also teaches a graduate biopsychology methods lab, as well as an undergraduate physiological psychology lab. To learn more, visit George Mason University.

Michael Dunbar (2010-2012)
University of Pittsburgh
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Research Focus: Health Research
Michael is primarily interested in the influence of environments on drug use behavior and health decision-making (e.g., cue-reactivity, stimulus control of drug use) in the real world. He is also interested in the relationship between drug craving and actual drug use. Recently, his work has focused on the effects that tobacco control policies (e.g., public smoking restrictions) have upon smoking patterns, and how this may inform the conceptualization and treatment of addictive disorders. Outside of the lab, he enjoys volunteering on various committees and mentoring students.

David Kille (2010-2012)
University of Waterloo
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Research Focus: Social/Personality Research
David R. Kille is a third year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He received his BA (Honors) in psychology from the University of Winnipeg. His current research interests span the domains of social cognition and close relationships. He is particularly focused on social aspects of goal pursuit and emotional contagion, with additional interests in how cognitive mindsets (e.g., thinking abstractly vs. concretely) interact with self-esteem to predict how relational information is processed.


Rachel Manes (2011-2013) City University of New York
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Research Focus: Developmental Research
Rachel is a doctoral student in the Developmental Psychology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has served as an educational consultant for advisement of literacy, prosocial, science, math, health, and physical education curricula. Her research interests include children's perceptions of a healthy habits lifestyle, implementation of developmentally appropriate practices & programs to reduce the childhood obesity epidemic, and the effects of exercise and food preferences on children's cognitive and social development. To learn more, visit Linkedin.


Stephen Mistler (2011-2013)
Arizona State University
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Research Focus: Psychological Methodology
Stephen is a quantitative psychology PhD student at Arizona State University. His research focuses on methods for handling missing data. Specifically, he is investigating methods for applying multiple imputation to multilevel data. He also works with many other analysis methods as a statistical consultant for professors and graduate students in various areas of psychology. To learn more, visit Mistler Statistical Consulting, LLC.



Evgeniya Pavlova (2011-2013)
University of South Florida
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Research Focus: Industrial/Organizational Research
Evgeniya is a graduate student in I/O Psychology at the University of South Florida working with Dr. Michael D. Coovert. Her research interests focus on technology and the various effects technology has on the work place. A line of work that she has pursued explores trust and its development in technology-mediated distributed teams. Additionally, she is interested in the ways people interact and utilize intelligent agents of varying autonomy in order to improve team effectiveness.


Natale Sciolino (2010-2012)
The University of Georgia
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Research Focus: Behavioral Neuroscience
Natale’s broad interests concern the neurobiological basis of emotion. More specifically, she is interested in understanding how lifestyle factors (e.g., stress, exercise) influence emotionality and its manifestation in the brain. She seeks to understand how perturbations in norepinephrine and galanin neurochemical signaling systems contribute to the behavioral impairments exhibited in mental pathology, including drug abuse and anxiety disorder. She is currently examining whether chronic voluntary exercise has the ability to treat the behavior induced by an animal model of persistent anxiety. Experiments are underway to evaluate whether these measures alter galanin expression in brain circuitry implicated in stress and anxiety. Because exercise alters brain galanin, she seeks to determine whether galanin neurotransmission is responsible for the hypothesized neuroprotective effects of exercise.

Nicolle Singer, Staff Liaison
(202) 336-6000
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