I am a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago working in Dr. Stew Shankman’s lab at Northwestern University. My work broadly aims to identify etiological mechanisms and/or risk factors associated with psychopathology, with a particular interest in depression and other internalizing psychopathologies. I have examined psychopathological dimensions at various levels of granularity (e.g., disorders, individual symptoms), often testing the specificity versus commonality of etiological mechanisms or risk factors. This line of research has been informed by research and issues related to the classification of psychopathology (e.g., the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology [HiTOP]), and has examined biobehavioral processes represented in the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) such as reward processing and threat sensitivity. An additional line of research has considered the possibility that psychopathological (co)morbidity may arise from causal relationships between individual symptoms.

I have used a variety of methods to study these topics, including laboratory experiments, psychophysiology (e.g., event-related potentials), experience sampling, longitudinal statistical methods, structural equation modeling, network analysis, and behavior genetics.