Graduate Students
Shana Ramsook
Shana is from Trinidad & Tobago and received her B.A. in Psychology from Pomona College in 2012. After graduation, she worked for two years at Temple University with Drs. Nora Newcombe and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, investigating children’s language development and spatial skills. Shana came to Penn State because of her interest in researching influences of language development on children’s emotional regulation from a developmental psychopathology perspective. Currently, Shana is working on her Master’s thesis, examining the interplay of preschoolers’ language use, emotion, and self-regulation during frustrating tasks. Shana is a TIES Training Interdisciplinary Educational Scientists (TIES) Fellow and is particularly interested in the educational implications of this research.
Lauren Vazquez
Lauren is from New Hampshire and received her B.A. in Psychology from Pomona College
in 2014. She worked for two years at the Yale Child Study Center in the Developmental Electrophysiology Lab and the Program for Anxiety Disorders where she helped collect and analyze neurophysiological data with children and their families. At Penn State, Lauren is interested in researching parent-child relationships and the neurophysiology underlying the development of children’s emotion regulation from a developmental psychopathology perspective. She is excited to join the PEEP project to learn more about neuroimaging methods and how children process emotions in their environments.
Samantha English
Sam is from Por
tsmouth, RI and received her B.A. in Cognitive Neuroscience from Brown University in 2014. After graduation, she spent two years working as the lab coordinator for the NYU Infant Cognition and Communication Lab where she was involved in the collection of data for a longitudinal study 
examining early speech and face preferences in infants at risk for Autism Spectrum Disorder. She came to Penn State because of her interest in parent-child relationships and the role parents play in how children learn to regulate emotion. She is excited to join the lab and learn more about co-regulation as a dynamic process and the implications for children’s later socioemotional development.
Tawni Stoop
Tawni is originally from New Jersey but received her B.A. from Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Before coming to Penn State, she worked as a Research Assistant at the National Center for PTSD in the VA Boston Healthcare system. While there, she helped manage and collect data from clinical interviews with veterans regarding their life experiences and mental health. She came to Penn State because even though she had previously been working with adults, she has always been interested in how children develop their emotional awareness based on what is going on around them. She is excited to join the PEEP project to work with the EAR information to learn more about children’s emotional environments in the home and how that influences their own understanding of emotion.
Sky Cardwell
Sky is from Little Rock, AR and received her B.A. from the University of Virginia. Before her time at Penn State, she worked as a Clinical 
Research Assistant on psychiatric clinical trials at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Sky came to Penn State to pursue her interest in studying how parents are involved in children’s self-regulation of emotion during early childhood. She is excited to be a part of the DYN-o-SR project and learn more about the development of children’s self-regulation as a dynamic process and how best to study such processes within a developmental framework.
Vanessa Kim
Vanessa was raised in Korea and graduated from Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea with a bachelor’s degree in Education. She completed a post-baccalaureate program at the University of California, Berkeley where she studied developmental risk and protective factors in Chinese American youths as well as the socio-emotional and language development of preschoolers from Chinese American and Mexican American families.
Vanessa came to Penn State to study emotion regulation development in preschool children at both the macro-level, especially in relation to the language development, and micro-level to capture moment-to-moment dynamics between emotion expressions and regulatory behaviors in children alone and parent-child dyads. She is excited to join the DYN-o-SR project and closely examine how children regulate emotion as well as study the relations between what children are saying and their expressed emotion while learning to wait.
Xutong Zhang
Xutong is from Hebei, China, and received her B.S. in Psychology from Beijing Normal University in 2016. She is now working toward her Ph.D. in Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State.
Xutong’s research focuses on the psychophysiological underpinnings of self-regulation, including how parents self-regulate in challenging parenting situations, and how parenting influences the development of children’s self-regulation. She is excited to be part of the DYN-o-SR project to examine these processes through a dynamic approach.
Nora Tucker
Nora is from Illinois and received her B.A. in Psychology from the University of Iowa where she worked with Grazyna Kochanska, and Jodie Plumert. Nora is interested in understanding how children develop the ability to regulate their emotions and the role that parents play in this process. She came to Penn State to work with Kristin Buss and Pamela Cole and is excited to be a part of the DYN-o-SR project to learn more about the development of children’s self-regulation as a dynamic process.