Principal Investigator
Josefina M. Grau is an associate professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Kent State University. She received her Ph.D. in clinical and developmental psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include the study of parenting and family processes and their relation to the social, emotional and cognitive development in children, with special interest in the roles culture and context play in these processes. Dr. Grau’s line of research on Latina adolescent parenthood has been funded by grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and has focused on the individual, family and contextual factors that influence the parenting adjustment of these young mothers and the developmental outcomes of their children. Her normative work on family-based predictors of peer competence focuses on the middle-childhood years in low-risk families, with an emphasis on parent-child relationship influences on children's development of emotional regulation. Dr. Grau teaches in the areas of normal and psychopathological development in children, child and family psychotherapy, and culture and ethnic minority issues in psychology.
Graduate Students
Aimee Hammer is currently completing her internship at the University of Alabama. Her research interests involve the quality of parent-child relationships in underrepresented populations. Specifically, she is interested in investigating the factors that contribute to mother-child relationship quality, as well as the influence of relationship quality on children’s developmental outcomes. Additionally, she is interested in examining how these associations vary within different cultures. Her dissertation will examine the role of culture in mother-child co-regulation and prospective associations with children’s emotion dysregulation.
Delilah Ellzey is a currently completing her internship at the Kennedy Krieger Institute. Delilah’s research focuses on cultural factors that impede and assist in the academic success of ethnic racial minority students. For example, Delilah examines the effect of ethnic racial identity on achievement outcomes. Her research has also explored culturally adapted psychological interventions for Black adolescents with anxiety. As the current public relations chair for the Multicultural Diversity Committee, Delilah is passionate about multicultural and diversity issues on the undergraduate and graduate level. Prior to graduate school, Delilah’s endeavors included serving low-income families living in Chicago and working with high achieving and gifted Black students. Delilah attained a B.A. in Psychology with a minor in Afro and African Studies from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) in 2014, where she was a research assistant in the McLoyd Lab.
Jordan Weith is a fifth year graduate student in the clinical program. Jordan's research interests focus on parent-child relationships and parental behavior within a cultural context. Specifically she is interesting in maternal teaching behaviors and how cultural orientation and parenting values influence the teaching behaviors mothers use, as well as how they relate to child outcomes. In addition, she is passionate about applying her research findings clinically to support child and pediatric populations.
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Lab Coordinator
Sara Paredes Raquel is a research intern at the Culture, Parenting, and Child Lab. She received her BA in Psychology from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras and an MA in Educational Psychology from Kent State University. Her master’s thesis examined the association between self-regulation and literacy skills among kindergarten Latino English language learners and English monolingual learners. Sara is broadly interested in studying how context and individual traits influence the socioemotional development of children and adolescents.
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Undergraduate Research Assistants
Ayonna Christopher is a junior psychology major and Spanish minor at Kent State. She is one of the newest research assistants of the Grau lab and is excited to be part of it. Aside from being apart of the lab, Ayonna is heavily involved in music, being a member of the Kent State Marching Golden Flashes, Flasher Brass, and Kent Chorus. Additionally, she is a member of Kappa Kappa Psi, which is a national honorary co-Ed music fraternity here on campus.
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Former Graduate Students
Lauren Wood, Ph.D. is a former doctoral student in the clinical program. Her research interests are centered around child development in cultural contexts. Specifically, she is interested in investigating the effects of parenting and family environments on both the normative and abnormal development of children in early life, and how these associations vary within different cultures and levels of cultural identity/values. Her masters thesis project examined cultural variations in associations between maternal behaviors and child self-regulation behaviors.
Stephanie Silberman, Ph.D., is a former doctoral student in the clinical program. She is interested in the role that social support and cultural factors play in the parenting and interaction styles of young Latina mothers and their children. For her dissertation project she is examining dyadic synchrony, a mother-child interaction style characterized by mutually responsive, harmonious exchanges. Stephanie completed her predoctoral internship at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine in Albuquerque.
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Petra (Patty) Duran, Ph.D., is a former doctoral student in clinical psychology, and she is interested in examining parenting, child development and the role of culture. She completed an APA internship at Baylor College of Medicine/Texas Children's Hospital in Houston, Texas. Patty will complete a Post Doctoral Fellowship at Texas Children's Hospital.
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Patty Castellanos, Ph.D., graduated from Kent State University in Clinical Psychology after completing an APA-accredited internship at Hennepin County Medical Center (HCMC) in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is currently finishing a fellowship in Primary Care Behavioral Health at HCMC’s Whittier Clinic. Dr. Castellanos will start a full-time position as staff at the Whittier Clinic later this fall and will provide brief behavioral health interventions and psychotherapy in English and Spanish. Dr. Castellanos’ clinical interests include working with women during and after pregnancy, working with patients who have experienced multiple traumas, and management of chronic diseases. Additional interests include working with multicultural patients, including a large immigrant and illiterate population. Dr. Castellanos’ research interests include romantic relationships of Latina adolescent mothers, relationship factors (social support, strain, satisfaction) that contribute to the psychological well-being of these young mothers, social support networks, and the impact of acculturation on these topics.
Erin Weller, Ph.D., currently works as a psychologist in the Trauma Infomed Day Treatment Program at Child & Adolescent Behavioral Health in Canton, OH where she also completed her APA-accredited pre-doctoral internship (2012-2013) and a postdoctoral fellowship (2013-2014). Her clinical interests include treatment of trauma-related disorders, anxiety, and depression; and she especially enjoys working with adolescents. Her graduate-school research focused on the impact of maternal psychopathology on children's behavioral and socioemotional outcomes as well as the potentially protective influence of child care provided by mother's romantic partners.
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