Alumni

Former Graduate Students

Maria Brucato
Email: Maria.brucato@temple.edu
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mariagbrucato
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/mariagbrucato
Website: https://mgbrucato.com/
As a doctoral student at RISC Lab, Maria studied the cognitive and neural mechanisms of perspective taking. Her dissertation work investigated the construct validity of perspective taking, including the behavioral and neural association of spatial, cognitive, and affective types of perspective taking, and the potential role of attentional control in supporting domain general perspective-taking abilities. Maria now works as the Director of Assessment, Evaluation, and Research at Jefferson Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education at Thomas Jefferson University where she continues to conduct behavioral and psychometric research, including projects related to perspective-taking abilities of healthcare students and professionals.

Rachel Myer
Email: rachel.myer@temple.edu
Rachel received her PhD in Psychology from Temple University in 2022. As part of the Research in Spatial Cognition (RISC) lab, she worked on projects focusing on how spatial skills impact STEM learning. Currently, she works as an IRB Program Coordinator at Temple University where she focuses on ensuring that research involving human subjects is conducted safely and ethically.

Kinnari Atit
Email: kinnari.atit@ucr.edu
Website: stemteachlearn.ucr.edu

Kinnari Atit received her PhD in Psychology at Temple University. She is a member of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC) and the Spatial Cognition and Action Perception Lab. Her graduate work focused on the role of gesture in science, technology, engineering, and math disciplines. Her dissertation investigated if and how gestures and models can be used to teach novice undergraduates to read and understand two-dimensional diagrams, specifically topographic maps. Later, Kinnari was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Riverside. She investigates how to improve students’ performance in STEM disciplines by improving their spatial reasoning skills, skills for visualizing and mentally manipulating objects.

Shannon Fitzhugh
Graduated in 2011 from Temple University.  Her initial work focused on mental rotation and training spatial skills in undergraduate students pursuing S.T.E.M. careers.  She helped establish the eye tracking lab for the SILC.  She then transitioned to collaborative project with the College of Education under the direction of Jennifer G. Cromley, examining the efficacy of teaching diagrammatic reasoning skills to high school students.  Using eye tracking before and after intervention, the team was able to demonstrate a shift in how students visually parse diagrams.  Dissertation work focused on the use of signalling techniques to help students integrate text and diagram information to create more holistic understanding of the material.  Use of signals resulted in a leveling of the playing field such that those with high background knowledge and low background knowledge performed equally on comprehension measures.  She left academia post graduation for industry and currently works at Vanguard as a Senior User Experience Researcher.

Nathan George
Email: ngeorge@adelphi.edu
Website: https://www.adelphi.edu/faculty/profiles/profile.php?PID=0738

Nathan George received his PhD in developmental psychology from Temple University in 2014. As a member of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC) and the Temple Infant and Child Lab (TICL), he researched children’s developing representations of force and motion both in their language and in their reasoning about the physical world. Nathan is now an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Derner School of Psychology at Adelphi University. His current research centers on how first-language representations of the world influence the learning of additional languages.

Justin Harris
Email: justin.harris.phd@gmail.com
Justin received his Ph.D. in developmental psychology at Temple University in January 2014. Justin’s graduate work was done as a member of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC) and the Temple Infant and Child Lab (TICL). His research focused on spatial thinking in children. His dissertation investigated children’s and adult’s conceptions on events with multiple components of motion (i.e., how a ball will roll after two cartoon hedgehogs blow on it) and how performance on this introductory level physics task might be related to spatial thinking. Justin then went on to become the Program Manager of the Hall of Human Life® program at the Museum of Science, Boston. This program allows visitors to explore five environments: Communities, Time, Organisms, Food, and Physical Forces, to investigate how different factors influence the environment and the humans who inhabit it. He is now a stay-at-home dad.

Mark Holden
Email: mark.holden@ucalgary.ca
Dr. Holden received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Temple University, working under Dr. Thomas Shipley. After graduating in 2011 Mark worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Elizabeth Hampson at the University of Western Ontario. He then became an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Department of Psychology at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Currently, he is an Instructor at the University of Calgary.

Corinne Holmes
Email: caholmes@fb.com
Corinne was a graduate student in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department at Temple University, and earned her Ph.D. in 2017. Corinne examined the effect of object rotation versus perspective taking on the formation and retention of spatial representations. In February 2017, Corinne began working as a Post Doctoral Fellow with Dr. Fiona Newell and the Multisensory Cognition Group at Trinity College in Dublin. She is now working at Facebook in Dublin.

Junko Kanero
Email: jkanero@ku.edu.tr
Junko Kanero received her PhD in Developmental Psychology and Neuroscience at Temple University in 2016.  She then worked as a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey, on the L2TOR project. The L2TOR (pronounced “el tutor”) project aims to design a child-friendly tutor robot that can be used to support teaching preschool children a second language by interacting with children in their social and referential world. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor in the Psychology Program at Sabanci University, in Istanbul, Turkey.

Kristin Ratliff
Email: krratliff@gmail.com
Kristin Ratliff graduated from Temple in 2007 with a PhD in Cognitive Psychology. Her dissertation examined evidence for an adaptive combination model of human spatial reorientation. After graduating in 2007, she stayed with SILC as a Postdoctoral fellow until 2008. She then went on to be Adjunct Faculty at Villanova University in 2007, and Director of Education Research with SILC at the University of Chicago from 2008 to 2010. She is now the Project Director for the Research & Development Department at WPS in Torrance, California.

Jessa Reed
Email: Reed.1448@osu.edu
Jessa earned her Ph.D. in developmental psychology with a concentration in developmental psychopathology from Temple University in 2015. During her graduate training, Jessa investigated how rhythm fosters learning through two programs of research. The first explored how an arts-enriched pedagogical approach to early childhood education could support preschoolers’ emerging school readiness skills. The second examined the social contexts that best scaffold early verb learning. Her dissertation utilized interruptions to experimentally manipulate dyadic exchanges, in order to assess the role of adaptive contingency (defined as prompt and meaningful responses to socio-communicative bids). Currently, Jessa is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery at Ohio State University College of Medicine. There, she is studying the language development of young children who are deaf or hard-of-hearing with cochlear implants or hearing aids.

Ilyse Resnick
Email: Ilyse.Resnick@canberra.edu.au
Website: University Website: https://researchprofiles.canberra.edu.au/en/persons/ilyse-resnick

Ilyse Resnick received her Ph.D. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Temple University in May 2013 (with a specialization in neuroscience and a Teaching in Higher Education Certificate). She then completed a highly competitive Institute of Education Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Delaware, on cognitive development and applications in educational settings. Ilyse is currently an Associate Professor of Learning Sciences (Cognition) at the University of Canberra and the Deputy Director of the STEM Education Research Centre (SERC).

Alexandra Twyman
Email: alexandra.twyman@ucalgary.ca

Alexandra received her B.S. in Psychology and Biological Sciences from the University of Alberta in 2006 and her Ph.D. from Temple University in 2011 under the mentorship of Dr. Newcombe. As a postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Brain and Mind at the University of Western Ontario, Alex focused on examining the neural foundations of spatial orientation to relate the findings from the adult brain to a better understanding of the timecourse of brain development during early childhood. In 2016 she became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Currently, she is an Instructor at the University of Calgary.

Steve Weisberg
Email: stevenweisberg@ufl.edu

Steven Weisberg graduated from Temple’s BCS program in 2014 with a PhD in Cognitive Psychology. His dissertation examined the cognitive correlates of navigation ability, and the relationship between navigation strategy and navigation aptitude. Additional research he conducted has included understanding how people learn to use topographic maps, how people navigate using slope cues, and the relationship between gesture and spatial learning. He then worked with Anjan Chatterjee at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, where he studied how the brain processes spatial directions in images and language. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Florida.

Zoe Ngo
Email: ngo@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
Zoe was a graduate student in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department with a concentration in Neuroscience at Temple University, working with Dr. Ingrid Olson and Dr. Nora Newcombe. She graduated in 2019. Her main research interests include relational and episodic memory, and memory development. She is currently a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in the Center for Lifespan Psychology.

Joy Ham
joyham@temple.edu

Former Post-Docs

Cristina Wilson
Email: wilsoncr@oregonstate.edu
Research Associate at the CoRIS Institute, Oregon State University

Dr. Wilson is a Research Associate in the Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems institute at Oregon State University. She grew up in Northwest Oregon and received her BS from Pacific University in 2012. Dr. Wilson is a cognitive scientist. She received her MS and PhD in cognitive psychology from Washington State University. From 2018 to 2022 she held a joint position as a postdoctoral research fellow in the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception Lab at the University of Pennsylvania and the Brain and Cognitive Sciences program at Temple University. Because of her intellectual background, Dr. Wilson’s research tends to emphasize the role of the human mind in human-robot teaming.

Alina Nazareth
Email: alina.nazareth@gmail.com

Allison Jaeger
Email: jaegerba@stjohns.edu
St. John’s University Assistant professor

Andrea Frick
Email: andrea.frick@unifr.ch
SNFS Associate Professor of Developmental Psychology, University of Fribourg

Kathyrn (Katie) Bateman
Email: kmb1182@gmail.com
Research Associate at Create For STEM at Michigan State University

Kristin Gagnier
Email: kristin.gagnier@jhu.edu 
Assistant Director of Dissemination, Translation, and Education, Science of Learning Institute, Johns Hopkins University

Tilbe Goksun
tilbegoksun@gmail.com
Associate Professor of Psychology at Koc University, Istanbul.

Jamie Jirout
Jirout@uva.edu
Assistant Professor in the Educational Psychology and Applied Developmental Sciences Program , University of Virginia

Wenke Mohring
Email: wenke.moehring@unibas.ch
Website: https://psychologie.ph-gmuend.de/psychologie/team
Senior Researcher, University of Basel

After graduating at the University of Zurich (Switzerland), Wenke was a post-doctoral fellow at Temple University, working with Dr. Nora Newcombe from 2012-2014. She was a member of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC) and the Research in Spatial Cognition Lab as well as the Temple Infant and Child Lab. Her main research interests include studying spatial thinking in children and adults, and she also investigated relations between spatial and mathematical thinking. After subsequent post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Fribourg and Basel (Switzerland), she is now a full Professor of Developmental and Educational Psychology at the University of Education Schwäbisch Gmünd (Germany).

Daniele Nardi
Email: dnardi@bsu.edu
Website: d-nardi.com
Associate Professor of Psychological Science at Ball State University

Victor Schinazi
v.schinazi@gmail.com
Assistant Professor of Psychology at Bond University, Australia and Principal Investigator of the Early Detection of Health Risks and Prevention Module in the Future Health Technologies Program in Singapore

Xiaoang (Irene) Wan
wanxa@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn
Professor of Psychology at Tsinghua University

Elliott Johnson
egjohnson@temple.edu

Iva Brunec
Iva.Brunec@temple.edu

Lab Coordinators & Research Assistants

Sarah Hendericks
sarahannehendricks@gmail.com
Previous Research Assistant

Sabrina Karjack
skarjack@ucdavis.edu
Graduate Student at the University of California, Davis

Elisabeth Boyce-Jacino
Email: eboycejacino@gmail.com
Elisabeth graduated with a BA in cognitive science from Vassar College, then worked as the RISC lab coordinator for 2 years. She then received her MS in developmental neuroscience from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where her research focused on visual and auditory perception in young children. She is now a Graduate Student Advisor at Northeastern University’s College of Science.

Rebecca Adler
rebecca.adler@vanderbilt.edu
Graduate Student at Vanderbilt University

Mia Velazquez
miavelazquez@uchicago.edu
Graduate Student at the University of Chicago

Ying Lin
ylin78@ur.rochester.edu
Graduate Student at the University of Rochester

Alexander Boone
alexander.boone@psych.ucsb.edu
Postdoc at Oregon State University

Kelly Bower
kbower1209@gmail.com
HR Coordinator at BTG, plc

Raymond Crookes
rc2698@columbia.edu
Graduate Student at Columbia University; Principal Data Scientist at Southern Company

Kate Margulis
ksmargulis@gmail.com
Graduate Student at Vanderbilt University

Shana Ramsook
kar419@psu.edu
Graduate Student at Penn State University

Paula Yust
paula.yust@gmail.com
Graduate Student at Duke University

Undergraduate Interns

Spring 2023

• John Erardi
• Linh Nguyen
• Gigi Campos
• Kara Storjohann
• Aleena Ataher
• Camille Strand
• Kelleen Greenawalt
• Abigail Losey
• Asha Mir-Young
• Caroline George
• Sam Keen
• Angela Paraska
• Jordan King
• Giavonna Zappone
• Siena Christopherson
• Willa Mazullo
• Julia Chein
• Salma Abdelgelil
• Amaya Adams
• Jiyeon Hwang
• Carolyn Gnage
• Jordyn Berry
• Ashley Cole