Meet the Lab
Dr. E Samuel Winer
Primary Investigator
The New School
Managers
Julia Machina
Lab Manager
The New School
Julia is a first-year PhD student in the Clinical Psychology program at The New School. Julia earned a BA with concentrations in Psychology, Visual Arts, and German from Sarah Lawrence College and an MA in General Psychology with a concentration in Mental Health & Substance Abuse Counseling from The New School. Her research interests include the impact of Reward Devaluation and Toxic Positivity on social identity, which she’s currently investigating through the lens of depression treatment for Black American men.
Sarah Simon
R15 Manager
The New School
Sarah is a first-year PhD student in the Clinical Psychology program. She received her Bachelor of Arts in psychology at SUNY Geneseo. Before starting her graduate work, she lived in Ecuador and Uruguay for four years, completing a Fulbright grant. She approaches clinical research through a critical lens, inspired by liberation psychology and cognitive science. Her current research interests include how reward devaluation theory (RDT) can help understand peoples’ motivations, social beliefs, and behaviors.
Shea McNatt
Assistant Lab Manager
The New School
Shea is the assistant lab manager. Shea received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology from The New School in 2023. Aside from coordinating the lab and helping with grant management, Shea is currently researching Fear of Happiness and how individuals implicitly view happiness.
Graduate Students
Samantha Anduze
The New School
Samantha is a second-year graduate student in the Clinical Psychology PhD program at The New School. Samantha received her Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology from Binghamton University. During her time at Binghamton, she worked in the Center for Transdisciplinary Research on Intimate Relationships with Dr. Richard Mattson. Her research interests include reward devaluation, trauma, and global mental health.
Sonora Goldman
The New School
Sonora is a second-year Clinical Psychology doctoral student. Her current research is concerned with the climate crisis and it’s impact on the psyche across culture, social identity, and differential access to power. Her recent research looks at fear of happiness and moral injury within a climate change context utilizing network analysis.
Evan Henritze
The New School
Evan Henritze is a Clinical Psychology doctoral student currently on internship at Mount Sinai Morningside and West Hospital Center. Evan’s primary research is on the effects of climate change on mental health. His dissertation uses network analysis to investigate the moral injuries associated with climate trauma based on social identity and access to political power. His principal advisor is Adam Brown, and he has worked with the EPEP laboratory since Fall 2021.
Michael Gallagher
Mississippi State University
Michael is a fourth-year graduate student in the Clinical Psychology PhD program at Mississippi State. Michael received his Bachelor of Science degree in clinical psychology at Marywood University. During his time at Marywood, he worked in the Cognitive and Perceptual Sciences Lab with Dr. Edward Crawley. His research interests include studying the cognitive impact of reward devaluation via the methods of cognitive science and network analysis.
Jenna Kilgore
Mississippi State University
Jenna is in the final year of her Clinical Psychology PhD program at Mississippi State. She is currently on internship at Biloxi VA Medical Center. Jenna’s research interests include long term self-regulation tendencies and reward devaluation with a particular interest in network analysis in relation to how depression is conceptualized among Black Americans, the latter of which is the focus of her dissertation.
Cami Calafiore
The New School
Cami is a second-year Master’s student in the psychology program at The New School. Cami joined the lab after completing her Master’s in clinical psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University and her undergraduate degree in Psychology at Wake Forest University. Cami’s research interests include investigating psychological systems, reward devaluation, diagnostic comorbidities, and psychotherapeutic interventions targeting comorbid anxiety and depression, via network analysis.
Amudha Balaraman
The New School
Amudha is a second-year student in the MA Psychology program at The New School. She has 10 years of experience in the public education field. She has also served as a middle school Language Arts teacher. Amudha earned a previous MA in Education and Social Policy from New York University and a BA in English from Cornell University. Her current research interests include emotional processes and appraisals, psychedelic-assisted therapy, boredom, scalable mental health initiatives, and mental health equity.
Rebecca Sills
The New School
Rebecca is a second-year graduate student in the General Psychology MA program at the New School for Social Research. She earned her Bachelor of Arts from The City College of New York (CCNY), where she graduated summa cum laude with a major in psychology and a minor in sociology. In 2021 she was the recipient of the Francis P. Hardesty award for excellence in psychology and research potential. Her areas of interest include behavior and motivation in individuals experiencing depression.
Kate Flaherty
The New School
Kate is a second-year MA student at NSSR. She received a BA with a concentration in Neuropsychology from Sarah Lawrence College, during which she began working on cognition research. She has contributed to research at NYU, Columbia, and Memorial Sloan Kettering, during which she has worked with multiple imaging modalities. Her graduate research interest is in cognitive sequelae of psychopathology, with particular interest in utilizing neurocognitive data and network analysis to identify mechanisms of change.
Aidan Kartha
The New School
Aidan is a second-year masters student at The New School’s Psychology program. He earned his Bachelors of Science in Psychology from the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities. His research interests focus on depression and anhedonia as well as global mental health and learning how to make mental health care and education more accessible.
Laurence Robin-Hunter
The New School
Laurence is a second-year student in the MA Psychology program at The New School. She earned a PhD in Geopolitics from the Sorbonne and a JD from Columbia Law School with a concentration in Human Rights. She has worked closely with refugee populations, and she has represented asylum seekers and death row inmates. She is currently researching the link between early adversity and devaluation of positivity in adults.
Samantha Melin
The New School
Samantha is a first-year graduate student in the Psychology MA program at the New School for Social Research. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from New York University. Her research interests include reward devaluation theory, the manifestation of depression in multicultural communities, and the co-occurrence of depression and autism spectrum disorder.
Ruly Zepeda
The New School
Ruly is a first-year graduate student in the General Psychology MA program at NSSR. He received his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he studied Psychology with an interest in counseling psychology. His research interests include post-pandemic mental health consequences in Latino adolescents, as well as the relationship between anhedonia severity and excessive social media use.
Ethan Beberness
The New School
Ethan is a first-year psychology MA student interested in the interactions between reward devaluation and morality, as well as in clinical structures for increasing access to free and low-cost psychodynamic therapies. He received a BA in English from Santa Clara University. Before joining The New School, Ethan published journalistic work covering arts and culture, the legal industry, and cannabis science.
Undergraduate Students
Layla A.
The New School
Layla is a fourth-year undergraduate student pursuing a Bachelor of Arts degree in Liberal Arts at the New School and has been a member of Dr. Winer’s lab since spring 2022. She is looking forward to assisting in an upcoming study and developing her research skills further. Her interests are in multicultural approaches to therapy and interdisciplinary psychology. Layla plans to pursue a Masters degree in Clinical Social Work after graduation.
Ceci Williams
The New School
Ceci is a third-year undergraduate student pursuing a B.A. in Psychology at The New School. Her research interests include emotional regulation and ego development within mental health, in particular the contributions of natural personality on emotional reactions and how adverse childhood experiences may foreshadow occurrences of phenomenons such as reward devaluation. After graduation, she hopes to pursue holistic psychotherapy and work towards a graduate degree in counseling psychology.
Graduate Student Alumni
Amanda Collins, PhD
Dartmouth College
Dr. Amanda Collins is a T32 postdoctoral research fellow in the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health at Dartmouth College. She received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Mississippi State University and completed her predoctoral clinical internship at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. At Mississippi State University, she investigated reward devaluation and self-referential processing in depressed individuals using network analysis and meta-analytic techniques. Dr. Collins is primarily interested in using intensive longitudinal data to investigate how changes in positivity appraisals and affect can predict depression and co-occurring disorders. She has also received funding through NIDA to develop a digital intervention to target reward devaluation and positive valence system dysfunction in depression and co-occurring disorders.
Alisson Lass, PhD
The Mayo Clinic
Dr. Lass is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Clinical Health Psychology at The Mayo Clinic with a clinical emphasis in integrated behavioral health. She graduated from Mississippi State University in 2022, and she completed her pre-doctoral internship at the Ann Arbor VAMC. Her research interests include the etiology, maintenance, and treatment of depressive symptoms, along with cognitive and emotional processes, such as reward devaluation and distress tolerance, that impact symptoms of depression over time.
Gage Jordan, PhD
Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center
Dr. Jordan is currently an assistant professor and staff psychologist at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Dr. Jordan practices within the Depression Recovery Center at the medical center. He graduated from the Clinical Psychology PhD program at Mississippi State University in 2020, working with Dr. Winer, and finished his APA-Accredited internship at the Southwest Consortium in Albuquerque, NM. His research interests include dimensions of anhedonia, network analysis applied to intensive longitudinal designs, and examining aversion to positivity and happiness in depressed persons.
Jessica Bryant, PhD
Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System
Dr. Bryant graduated from the Clinical Psychology PhD program at MSU in 2018, having worked on questions of fearing positivity, anhedonia, and treatment choice with Dr. Winer. She completed her APA-Accredited internship at the Mississippi State Hospital in Jackson, MS, and her clinical fellowship at the Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System in Little Rock, AR. She currently is a staff psychologist at the Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System.
Taban Salem, PhD
Millsaps College
Dr. Salem is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Millsaps College in Jackson, MS. Before accepting a tenure-track position, Dr. Salem completed a Presidential post-doctoral fellowship at the Ohio State University’s Department of Psychiatry, where she worked with Mary Fristad, after having completed her APA-Accredited internship at SUNY Stony Brook and her PhD here at Mississippi State working with Dr. Winer. Dr. Salem’s research interests include mechanisms of emotion regulation, interactions of cognition and emotion over time, and perceived causal beliefs among depressed persons.
Undergraduate Alumni
Nour Bseiso
The New School
Nour recently graduated from the New School with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology. She joined the lab in the Spring of 2022 and feels inspired by her peers’ work around reward devaluation, self-referential positivity and anhedonia. Her interests include positive and negative emotions, emotion regulation, cognitive-behavioral and dialectical-behavior treatments, emotion replication and multicultural considerations in treatment. After graduation, she hopes to pursue a Masters and PhD in clinical psychology.
Gemma Park
Mississippi State University
Gemma (Bohyun) graduated from MSU with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology in the spring of 2020. She joined the lab in the fall of 2019 to learn more about cognitive bias in individuals with mood disorders, with a specific interest in attentional bias. After graduation, Gemma worked at pediatric and adult psychiatric labs in South Korea, where she developed her interest in neural substrates of the interaction between emotion regulation and cognitive ability in individuals with depression and anxiety. She is currently in the Clinical Psychology Ph.D. program at the University of South Florida. Her current research interests include using different ERP components to predict internalizing and externalizing symptoms and examining the role of emotion regulation in alleviating and aggravating symptom severity.
Ashlynn McCain
Mississippi State University
Ashlynn is a senior undergraduate pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Psychology and a Bachelor’s of Art in Communication. She joined the lab in Spring 2019 to further learn about the effects of depression. Ashlynn plans to purse a Ph.D. in clinical psychology after graduating from State and hopes to one day teach at a university. Her research interests include self-harm, eating disorders, depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts and ideations, the genetic influence on mental health, and the experience of childhood and its effect on adult life.
Love Thomas
Mississippi State University
Love is a senior undergraduate pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Psychology. She joined the laboratory in Summer 2019 to gain further experience conducting psychopathology research. After graduation, she plans to pursue a PhD in Clinical Psychology and would like to work with veterans and those still deployed.
Julie Miller
Mississippi State University
Julie is a sophomore undergraduate pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Psychology at Mississippi State University. She joined the lab in Fall 2020 to advance her knowledge and experience with psychopathology research. After completing her undergraduate degree, Julie plans to pursue either a Masters or PhD in Psychology. She hopes to gain more insight into potential career paths through working in the lab.
Katy Mahaffey
Mississippi State University
Katy is a freshman undergraduate pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Psychology at Mississippi State University. She joined the lab in Spring 2021 to become further involved in research and to explore possible career options in the field of psychology. After completing her undergraduate degree, she plans to further her education by pursuing either a Masters degree or PhD in psychology.
Carson Allen
Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System
Carson graduated with his Bachelor of Science in Psychology in Spring 2019. Carson joined the lab in Summer 2018 to gain experience in psychopathology research. His research interests include pediatric psychopathology and early interventions. Carson is currently working as a full-time post-baccalaureate research assistant on the CHild Access to Mental Health and Psychiatry (CHAMP) team in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.
Jordan Mayes King
Mississippi State University
Jordan graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Mississippi State University. Jordan joined the lab in Spring 2019 after graduating to gain more experience and knowledge regarding psychopathology. Jordan is currently attending medical school at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.
Colton Watson
Mississippi State University
Colton is a senior undergraduate pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry at Mississippi State University. Colton is a Provost Scholar at Mississippi State and joined the lab in Spring 2019 and is interested in anxiety and anxiety-related disorders. After completing his undergraduate degree, Colton plans to attend medical school with an eye on MD/PhD programs.
Matthew Dunaway
University of Michigan
Matthew joined the lab in Summer 2014, and contributed by helping run subjects, aiding in the conceptualization of new studies, and by contributing to papers examining psychopathology and inhibitory cognitive mechanisms. He will complete his Master’s degree from Georgia State University in Summer of 2021, defending a thesis on negative emotion and music. In Fall of 2021, Matthew will begin working on his PhD in Psychology within the University of Michigan Psychology Department’s Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience area.
Brooke Berry
Villanova University
Brooke graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology in Spring 2020. Brooke joined the lab in Summer 2018 to gain further insight on psychopathology and its research. Brooke is currently pursuing her Master of Science in Psychology at Villanova University. After graduation, she plans to pursue a PhD in Clinical Psychology.
Toni Arroyave
Baruch College
Toni graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology in Spring 2020. She joined the lab in Fall 2019 in order to gain experience in conducting research. Toni is currently pursuing her Masters of Science in Industrial/Organizational Psychology at Baruch College.
Will Textor
Florida State University
Will graduated from Mississippi State in Spring 2019 with a Bachelor of Arts in English. He joined the lab in Spring 2017. During his undergrad career, he was inducted into the university’s Phi Beta Kappa chapter, received the prestigious Magruder Scholarship, and presented poems for the university’s first TEDx program. He is currently a 3L at Florida State University College of Law.
Isabelle Comfort
Arizona State University
Isabelle graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology in Spring 2020. Isabelle joined the lab in Fall 2018 for experience and to explore researching and future career plans. She will attend Arizona State University in August 2021 to pursue her Master of Science in Applied Behavior Analysis. She plans to become a Behavior Analyst after receiving her master’s degree.
Juliet Warriner
Mississippi College
Juliet graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology in Spring 2020. She joined the lab in Summer 2019 to gain research experience in depression and in the field of Clinical Psychology. Juliet is currently pursuing her Master of Science in Mental Health Counseling at Mississippi College.
Isabelle Comfort
Arizona State University
Isabelle graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology in Spring 2020. Isabelle joined the lab in Fall 2018 for experience and to explore researching and future career plans. She will attend Arizona State University in August 2021 to pursue her Master of Science in Applied Behavior Analysis. She plans to become a Behavior Analyst after receiving her master’s degree.
Juliet Warriner
Mississippi College
Juliet graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology in Spring 2020. She joined the lab in Summer 2019 to gain research experience in depression and in the field of Clinical Psychology. Juliet is currently pursuing her Master of Science in Mental Health Counseling at Mississippi College.
Taylor Scroggins
University of the Cumberlands
Taylor graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology in Spring 2020. Taylor joined the lab in Summer 2018 to gain research experience and further her knowledge of psychopathology research. She is currently enrolled at the University of the Cumberlands in their clinical mental health counseling program.
Taylor Welch
Mississippi State University
Taylor graduated in Spring 2020 with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology at Mississippi State University. She joined the lab in Fall 2018 to improve her understanding of psychopathology and to gain experience in conducting research. Taylor is currently working as a training specialist in collaboration with various state agencies, training state employees in the use of computer software necessary for their work.
Lindsay Jimenez
Children’s Hospital of Mississippi
Lindsay graduated with her Bachelor of Science in Psychology in December 2019. She joined the lab in Fall 2018. Lindsay just graduated in nursing from the University of Mississippi Medical Center and is working as a Registered Nurse in the NICU at Children’s of Mississippi.
Cara Willoughby
National Alliance of Mental Illness Mississippi
Cara graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology. She joined the lab in Spring 2020 to obtain experience in psychopathology and to learn how to apply her knowledge of behavioral research methods. Cara is currently working as the program development intern for National Alliance of Mental Illness Mississippi.
Lexi Reeves
University of Tennessee, Chattanooga
Lexi graduated with her Bachelor of Science in Psychology in Spring 2019. She joined the lab in the Fall of 2017 to gain experience in psychopathology. Her research interest includes the psychology of gender, human sexuality, and depression. Lexi is pursuing her Master of Science in Industrial-Organizational Psychology at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga.
Joan Nichols
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Joan is pursing her Master of Science in Counseling with a concentration in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She has plans to work as a Sexual Assault Advocate after receiving her degree.
Annie Sheffield
Auburn University
Annie is pursuing her Master of Science degree in Industrial/Organizational Psychology at Auburn University. She has plans to work in the business world after she receives her degree.
Katelyn Majors
Boise State University
Katelyn graduated in Spring 2018. She received her Master of Social work at Boise State University with plans to serve minoritized individuals after receiving her clinical license.
Hannah Holetz
Mississippi State University
Hannah graduated in Spring 2018. She is currently conducting research and overseeing database collection for a private agency in Arkansas.