All colloquiums will be held in person in WGR 201a. Please send an email to gupsychologydepartment@georgetown.edu for additional information.
September 13, 2024, 12 pm
Speaker: Dr. Nick Allen
Dr. Nick Allen has more than thirty years of experience in clinical psychology practice, research, and education. His research aims to understand the interactions between multiple risk factors for adolescent onset mental health disorders, and to use these insights to develop innovative approaches to prevention and early intervention. His group holds multiple National Institutes of Health and industry-funded grants for work focusing on the use of mobile and wearable technology to monitor risk for poor mental health outcomes including suicide, depression, and bipolar disorder. His team has developed software tools that combine active and passive sensing methods to provide intensive longitudinal assessment of behavior with minimal participant burden. The ultimate aim of these technologies is to develop a new generation of “just-in-time” behavioral interventions for early intervention and prevention of mental health problems. He is currently leading a project with Google to determine the effect that smartphone usage has on mental health. Nick is also the co-founder and CEO of Ksana Health Inc, a company whose mission is to use research evidence and modern technology to revolutionize the delivery of mental health care through remote behavioral monitoring and adaptive, continuous behavior change support.
September 27, 2024, 12 pm
Speaker: Dr. Kyle Bourassa
Dr. Kyle Bourassa is a Staff Psychologist in the Research Service of the Durham VA Medical System, an Affiliate Investigator at Georgetown University’s Department of Psychology, and a Senior Fellow in Duke University’s Aging Center. He completed a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at the University of Arizona and his doctoral internship at the VA Puget Sound Healthcare System in Seattle. He completed postdoctoral training through a T32 training grant at Duke University and an advanced fellowship in aging at the Durham VA. He is currently funded by a Career Development Award from the Clinical Science Research & Development service of the VA Office of Research and Development. Kyle’s research focuses on how stress, adversity, and trauma might impact health across the lifespan, with a focus on psychosocial and physiological dysregulation that could lead to the onset and progression of chronic diseases, disability, and premature mortality. His recent work has highlighted the role that inflammation and accelerated biological aging might play in linking adversity to poor health as people age.
Title: Trauma, adversity, and health across the lifespan: Opportunities for prevention and treatment
October 11, 2024, 12 pm
Speaker: Emily Handford
Emily Hanford is a senior correspondent and producer at APM Reports and host of Sold a Story, the groundbreaking investigative podcast that’s changing how kids are taught to read. Sold a Story was one of the most-shared shows on Apple Podcasts in 2023 and one of Time Magazine’s top podcasts of the year. It has won numerous honors including a duPont, an Edward R. Murrow and a Peabody nomination. Emily’s career in journalism began with an internship at the public radio station in her college town (WFCR-Amherst). She then worked for Ira Glass when he was making the pilots for This American Life. Emily was a reporter and host at WBEZ-Chicago and news director and senior editor at WUNC-Chapel Hill, where she won her first duPont for a series on poverty in North Carolina. Emily has been at APM since 2008. Her reporting on education has won many honors including the inaugural Public Service Award from the Education Writers Association and the award for excellence in reporting on education research from the American Educational Research Association. Emily is a graduate of Amherst College. She is based in Washington, D.C., where she is journalist-in-residence at Planet Word, the museum of words and language. She lives with her husband, Derek Goldman, a professor at Georgetown University. They have two adult sons.
Title: Lessons from the Field: A Journalist’s Journey into the Science of Learning
November 1, 2024, 12 pm
Speaker: Dr. Leonie Huddy
Dr. Leonie Huddy is a Professor of Political Science at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and currently the Department Chair. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from University of California, Los Angeles.
She is the co-editor (with David O. Sears and Jack Levy) of the 2nd edition of the Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, served as co-editor of the journal Political Psychology from 2005 till 2010, is past-president of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP), serves on the American National Election Studies Board of Overseers, appears regularly on CSB Radio as an exit poll analyst, and serves on numerous editorial boards in political science. Huddy has written extensively on social and political identities, emotions, reactions to terrorism, gender and politics, and race relations. She is the co-author (with Stanley Feldman and George Marcus) of Going to War in Iraq: When Citizens and the Press Matter, published by the University of Chicago Press, which examines news coverage and public opinion in the lead-up to the Iraq War.
Title: When Veracity Fails: News Sharing as Expressive Partisanship
November 15, 2024, 12 pm
Speaker: Dr. Rebecca Johnson
Evan M. Gordon, PhD, is an assistant professor and principal investigator in the Neuroimaging Labs Research Center, based in Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology (MIR) at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Gordon’s research focuses on the noninvasive identification and characterization of functional brain units within individual human brains. This work aims to develop techniques that can precisely describe the detailed organization of the individual human brain, to understand how individuals can vary from each other in their brain organization, and to understand how that variable organization is related to motor, sensory and cognitive function. This research is conducted using a variety of neuroimaging techniques, including structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), as well as diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). Gordon completed his doctorate at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. following an undergraduate degree from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
December 6, 2024, 12 pm
Faculty Symposium
February 21, 2025, 12 pm
Speaker: Dr. Daniel Pine
Daniel S. Pine, MD is Chief, Section on Development and Affective Neuroscience in the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Intramural Research Program. After graduating from medical school at the University of Chicago, Dr. Pine spent 10 years in training and research on child psychiatry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. Since medical school, he has been engaged continuously in research focusing on the epidemiology, biology, and treatment of pediatric mental illnesses. His areas of expertise include biological and pharmacological aspects of mood, anxiety, and behavioral disorders in children, as well as classification of psychopathology across the lifespan. This expertise is reflected in more than 300 peer-reviewed papers. Currently, his research group is examining the degree to which mood and anxiety disorders in children and adolescents are associated with underlying abnormalities in the amygdala, prefrontal cortex, and associated brain regions. Dr. Pine has served as the Chair of the Psychopharmacologic Drug Advisory Committee for the Food and Drug Administration and Chair of the Child and Adolescent Diagnosis Group for the DSM-5 Task Force. He has received many awards, including the Joel Elkes Award from the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, the Blanche Ittelson Award from the American Psychiatric Association, and the Ruane Prize from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation.
Title: Advancing Psychiatric Care through Research in Clinical Neuroscience
March 14, 2025, 12 pm
Speaker: Dr. Qiwei (Britt) He
Dr. Qiwei (Britt) He is Associate Professor in the Data Science and Analytics Program, and
Founder and Director of the AI-Measurement and Data Science Lab at Georgetown University.
Her research focuses on advancing methodologies in psychometric modeling, sequence mining, text mining, and machine learning on new data sources such as process data and textual data collected in digital-based assessments in education, psychology, psychiatry, and public health. Prior to this appointment, Dr. He was a Senior Research Scientist in the Advanced Psychometrics and Data Science Center at Educational Testing Service (ETS) for over nine years, overseeing research on innovative item type development, automated assessment, technology-based environment design, and sequential process data analyses in national and international large-scale assessments such as PISA, PIAAC and NAEP, as well as K-12 education assessments and learning projects. Dr. He was appointed as OECD Thomas J. Alexander Fellow in 2018 and has been serving on the Psychometrics and Educational Evaluation Panel for UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Policy Linking Panel for USAID, and Expert Group for OECD PISA-Vocational Education and Training. Recently, she was selected into the joint Committee of AERA, NCME and APA for the revision of the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. Dr. He was the recipient of National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) Annual Award of Exceptional Achievement in 2023, NCME Jason Millman Promising Measurement Scholar Award in 2019, NCME Alicia Cascallar Outstanding Paper of Early-Career Scholar Award in 2017, and American Psychological Association Quantitative Methods Dissertation Award.
Title: Identifying Behavioral Patterns in Large-Scale Educational Assessments with Sequential Process Data
March 28, 2025, 12 pm
Speaker: Dr. Sarah Coyne
Dr. Sarah M. Coyne is a professor of human development in the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University. She received her BSc degree in Psychology from Utah State University, and her PhD in Psychology from the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, England. Her research interests involve media, aggression, gender, and child development. Dr. Coyne has over 200 publications on these and other topics. She regularly speaks to families and teenagers about using media in positive ways. She has 5 young children and currently lives in Salem, Utah.
Title: Problematic Media Use during Early Childhood
April 11, 2025, 12 pm
Speaker: Dr. AJ Alvero
AJ Alvero is a computational sociologist at the Cornell University. His primary research interests are in language, race/ethnicity, culture, and education. His current work uses computational techniques to analyze college admissions essays and model the social patterns within them. AJ’s future research plans include investigations into machine translation and multilingualism, social media and hate speech, and organizational communication and decision making. Prior to entering academia, AJ was a high school teacher in Miami, FL. His work sits at the intersection of data science, sociology, language, and identity research.
Title: Who Do Large Language Models Write Like?