Current Graduate Students

Brenden is a second-year student in the Clinical Psychology Health Emphasis PhD Program. He earned his B.A. in Psychology and Classical Studies from Brandeis University. Before pursuing a doctoral degree, Brenden worked as a research coordinator at Joslin Diabetes Center in the Pediatric, Adolescent, and Young Adult section, where he coordinated a 12-month, NIH R01-funded psychosocial intervention aimed at improving glycemic control and reducing diabetes distress in adolescents and young adults with type 1 diabetes. Prior to this, he worked at Brown University Health in the Bradley-Hasbro Children's Research Center, where he assisted with a variety of research projects focusing on early childhood mental health and worked with the Early Childhood Outpatient and SUCCESS programs to link parents and early childhood learning professionals with children's mental health services. During his time at Brandeis, he worked in the Child and Adolescent Research on Development (CARD) Lab on a project examining children's compliance with a novel music curriculum in a preschool setting. At the HEARTS lab, Brenden hopes to explore the relationship between social support, trauma history, and comorbid physical/psychological symptoms and treatment adherence in organ transplant recipients .

Research Interests: adherence, anxiety disorders, chronic illness, emerging adults, organ transplant, pediatric psychology, social determinants of health, social support, trauma history. 

2025-2026 Externship: Northport VA Medical Center -- Serious Mental Illness Outpatient Psychotherapy 

Emily is a first-year student in the clinical health emphasis PhD program at Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology. She recently earned her BS from Cornell University, where she worked as a research assistant in the Purpose and Identity Processes Lab. For her senior honors thesis, she examined the influence of social comparison processes on well-being using ecological momentary assessments (EMAs). Her research interests center on social cognitive processes, specifically stress and decision-making regarding health behaviors and outcomes. In the HEARTs lab, Emily hopes to explore individual and community-level influences of decision-making processes and motivation in healthy behaviors to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease.