Student Information
Katherine Bevans, M.S.
Current research interests: the effects of exposure to community violence on child-level mental health and cognitive functioning. Katherine is especially interested in family level protective factors and child-level mediators including neuro-endocrine responses to stress and world assumptions. For more info, click here.
Kristine S. Bourgeois, M.A., M.Ed.
Current research interests: effective programming for young children with
autism. Past research interests have included state self-esteem, the sociometer
theory, and hurt feelings.
Curriculum Vitae
Heather Brandt
Current research interests: examining
the effect of traumatic stress upon the cognitive abilities of children
exposed to community violence.
Yael Efreom, M.S.
Current research interests: Exposure to community violence, resilient factors in both African American families, including parental monitoring, and African American children including perceptions of safety. For more info, click here.
Amanda Garcia
Current research interests: related to the expression of anxiety and how exposure to trauma may impact this expression across Caucasian Americans and Hispanic Americans.
DeMarquis Hayes, M.S.
Current research interests: issues of resiliency and vulnerability in African American adolescents. DeMarquis has been f
focusing on examining variables that influence academic and psychosocial outcomes in adolescents. He has been particularly interested in the role parents and school personal play in acting as buffers for adolescents against negative life stressors. Also, DeMarquis has focused on how adolescents interpret their experiences, perceptions of support, and other life events to determine how their perceptions affect their outcomes.
Faye Kim
Current research interests: Funtional Communication Training with students with developmental disabilities. Enhancing the effects of reinforcement with a punishment procedure. Research with children with pediatric feeding disorders - failure to thrive and food refusal. Increasing peer initiation and interaction in high functioning children with autism through the use of self-monitoring.
Deborah Kruglak, M.S.
Current research interests: adolescent health attitudes and behavior change during college. Specifically, Debbie focuses on the factors associated with smoking initiation, maintenance, and cessation among college populations.
Lucinda Lang
Current research interests: the role of significant others for positive and negative outcomes of high achieving African American adolescent females.
Tim Luis
Current research interests:
Brian Mackey, M.S.
Current research interests: contextualizing health risk behaviors, the effect of gender on smoking. For more info, click here
Megan McFarland, M.S.
Current research interests: educational resilience in urban schools. In particular, Megan is interested in the extent to which current school systems serve all students. Her master's thesis examines factors that impact adolescents' plans to succeed and sense of responsibility in academic areas. Megan would also like to contribute to the field of school psychology, concrete quantitative evidence of the necessity for school curricula and services that reach students of all ethnic backgrounds. In addition, through her work at Tulane's Office of Service Learning, she plans to evaluate the effects of having college service learners working as tutors in New Orleans schools. She has begun examining the political, social, and racial beliefs that Tulane students bring to service learning and how those beliefs change as they participate in service learning.
Brenda Meli
Current research interests: an investigation of the effectiveness of the current implementation of Functional Behavioral Assessment in public schools as mandated by the 1997 reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).
Sterett Mercer, M.S.
Current research interests: White racial identity in relation to past experiences and other variables such as satisfaction with college. For more info, click here
Devi Miron, M.S.
Current research interests: the impact of service learning on college students and community agencies. Devi is also involved in a project investigating the behavioral, emotional, and cognitive functioning of children ages 4-9 that have recently been returned to their homes after being in foster care.
Samantha Morrison, M.S.
Current research interests: the role of social beliefs as a mediator between
exposure to community violence and negative peer group involvement and
aggression.
Rebecca Salvato
Current research interests: emotion regulation as a mediator of attention processes in children with a history of recurrent, persistent ear infections. Broadly, Rebecca is interested in identifying protective factors for social and academic success, particularly in culturally diverse children and adolescents. An ongoing research interest is in the role of deaf culture and deaf identity on academic and social success in deaf children and adolescents. For more info, click here.
Leslie Sutro, M.S.
Alexa Walthall, M.S.
Current research interests: topographical spatial skills of preschool- and early elementary school-aged children. Specifically, Alexa is looking at differences in spatial ability and verbal explanations of a spatial task between 5- and 7-year-old children. In addition, she is participating in a project that is examining the effects of foster care on Romanian orphans' cognitive and emotional growth.