Dr. Dougherty received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Stony Brook University. Dr. Dougherty is the Director of Clinical Training and the Director of the Big Emotions Across Development Lab (BEAD) at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research is in the field of developmental psychopathology and broadly examines the phenomenology, etiology and course of depression from a developmental, lifespan perspective.
Dr. Ethan Mereish is an Associate Professor and the director of the Lavender Lab in the Department of Psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park. He's also an Adjunct Associate Professor at Brown University. He completed his doctoral training at Boston College, a clinical psychology residency at Harvard Medical School, and a postdoctoral research fellowship at Brown University.
I am a Professor in the Department of Psychology (Clinical and CNS Area Groups), core faculty member of the interdepartmental Neuroscience and Cognitive Science (NACS) Doctoral Program and the Maryland Neuroimaging Center (MNC), and Director of the Affective and Translational Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Maryland. My work has been continuously supported by the NIH since 2016 and led to well over 100 publications (h-index: 55).
Daniela graduated from San Francisco State University with an M.A. in Mind, Brain, and Behavior. In 2026, she began her doctoral training in the Cognitive and Neural Systems Doctoral Program at the University of Maryland, where her research focuses on cognitive-affective processes related to substance abuse and neuropsychiatric disorders.
Isabella Klopukh is a Psychology Ph.D. student in the Cognitive and Neural Systems area working with Dr. Michael Dougherty.
She received a B.A. in Psychology from Florida Atlantic University in 2024, where she conducted research in the Lifespan Cognition, Close Relationships, and Machine Perception & Cognitive Robotics labs. Her research has spanned several areas, including the of the timing of metacognitive judgments in memory decision-making, linguistic analysis of partner evaluations, and using machine learning to predict personality and relationship outcomes.
Dr. Weizhen Xie is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Brain and Behavior Institute. He obtained his undergraduate degree from Renmin University of China and pursued research training at the University of California, Davis, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He then completed his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology at the University of California, Riverside, where he studied the neurocognitive mechanism of visual short-term memory precision. Following his Ph.D., Dr.
Dr. Desiree (Desi) Jones is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and director of the SHINE Lab (Stigma, Human Interaction, and Neurodivergent Experiences) at the University of Maryland. Her research explores how autistic and non-autistic people understand and interact with one another, with a focus on stigma, identity, and masking in social interactions. She often centers the experiences of autistic people from underrepresented groups and uses both experimental and qualitative methods in her work. Dr.
Caroline Charpentier is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology, Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science, and the Brain and Behavior Institute. She obtained her PhD in cognitive neuroscience at University College London, UK, with her dissertation focusing on the interaction between emotions and decision-making. She then completed her postdoctoral training at the California Institute of Technology, studying the behavioral, neural, and computational mechanisms of social learning and decision-making.
I am a Lecturer in the Social Data Science Major and Department of Psychology at the University of Maryland. Go Terps! Previously, I earned my Ph.D. in Quantitative Psychology and MS in Applied Statistics from The Ohio State University in 2023 where I studied mediation (indirect effects), moderation (conditional effects), dyadic data analysis, resampling methods, statistical power analysis, and data visualization. I have held numerous positions in industry and academia that have given me a unique approach to and view of research methods and statistics.