ELG
Dr. Elena L. Grigorenko received her Ph.D. in general psychology from Moscow State University, Russia, in 1990 and a Ph.D. in developmental psychology and genetics from Yale University in 1996. Currently, Dr. Grigorenko is Associate Professor of Child Studies and Psychology at Yale and Associate Professor of Psychology at Moscow State University.
Dr. Grigorenko’s primary interest is in understanding the co-contribution of genetic and environmental risk factors to the manifestation of developmental and learning disabilities in children. She is especially interested in how children with special needs, such as those infected with intestinal parasites or diagnosed with autism, succeed by capitalizing on their strengths. Her work in this area has contributed to the field’s general understanding of the flexibility and malleability of human development. Dr. Grigorenko’s use of diverse methodologies, ranging from molecular genetics to cultural studies, enriches the field and provides more opportunities for understanding how children grow and mature. These methodologies include family designs (both behavioral and molecular-genetic) and educational intervention designs. To illustrate, her ongoing studies include research on international adoptees brought to the U.S. early in life; a study of rates of learning disabilities in harsh developmental environments with high rates of illness, intoxication, and poverty; and research on interactions between genetic and environmental risk factors for conduct problems. Dr. Grigorenko has worked with children and their families in the U.S. as well as in Africa (Kenya, Tanzania and Zanzibar, the Gambia, and Zambia), India, and Russia. She is especially interested in studying risk factors for language and mathematics disabilities, autism, and violent criminal behaviors in pre-adolescent children.
Dr. Grigorenko has published more than 150 peer reviewed articles, book chapters, and books. She has received awards for her work from five different divisions of the American Psychological Association: the Gardner Lindzey Dissertation Award in General Psychology, Sigmund Koch Early Career Award in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, Berlyne Early Career Award for Creative Achievement in Psychology of the Arts, Boyd McCandless Early Career Award in Developmental Psychology, and Richard E. Snow Early Career Award in Educational Psychology. In 2004, she won the APA Distinguished Award for an Early Career Contribution to Developmental Psychology. Dr. Grigorenko’s research has been funded by NIH, NSF, DOE, USAID, Cure Autism Now, the Foundation for Child Development, and other federal and private sponsoring organizations.
Tina Newman Ph.D
Ph.D. School/Applied Child Psychology, M.A., Educational Psychology (Special Populations), and B.A. in Exceptionality in Human Learning/Psychology. Her clinical work and research focuses on children with special needs - especially students identified with Autism Spectrum Disorders, learning or behavioural difficulties. She is the co-director with Dr. Sara Sparrow of the PACE Center Assessment Clinic. Her current research projects include a study investigating the school readiness skills of children adopted from Russia, as compared to children raised in their biological families, or in an institutional environment. In addition, she is the project director of a team developing an augmented assessment of giftedness.
Lesley Hart Ph.D
Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Pittsburgh, at the Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC) and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC), with advisor Charles A. Perfetti
Thesis, April, 2005:
A Training Study using an Artificial Orthography: Effects of Reading Experience, Lexical Quality, and Text Comprehension in L1 and L2
M.A. in Experimental Psychology from Wake Forest University, with advisor Dale Dagenbach
Thesis, August, 1997: An Extension of the Visual Quality Diagnostic: A Model for Distinguishing Parallel V. Serial Processing
Research Interests: development, skilled performance, and impairments in language and reading processes. Specifics, among others, include:
- The interaction of reading processes including those involving phonology, orthography, semantics, morphology, fluency, syntax, and structure building in skilled reading comprehension
- The effect of other variables such as verbal working memory, reading, language, and educational experience, and environmental factors (e.g. toxins, parasites, access to education) in reading and language competence
- The cross-language (e.g. Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Nyanja, Gonja, Ewe, Twi) study of reading and language processes to elucidate language processes and test hypotheses
- The genetic bases for reading and language disorders
- The exploitation of existing patterns in languages and writing systems (e.g. homophones, homographs, certain syntactic structures, etc) and groups of people (e.g. bilingual, adopted children, population isolates, siblings, twins, and nuclear and extended families) to study specific reading and language processes test hypotheses
- The remediation of reading and language disorders
Current Projects:
- Studying the phenotypic and genotypic makeup of language disorders in a population isolate in Russia
- Assessing the epidemiology of reading, language, and mathematical disorders in Zambian children
- Identifying the manifestation of learning disabilities in Ghanaian children and educating Ghanaian teachers in management and teaching of children with special needs
- Investigating the nature of hyperlexia (superior reading decoding ability) in children with autism spectrum disorders
- Following the course of language and cognitive development in children adopted from Russia
- Developing reading and language assessment tools at levels, lengths, and administration protocols appropriate for specific populations including Russian children and American college students
- Locating and screening extended family members from several large, well-categorized pedigrees originally acquired in Sweden
Sara Sparrow
Sara Sparrow, Ph.D. in clinical psychology and neuropsychology from the University of Florida, is the author of over 100 articles and chapters in the fields of psychological assessment and developmental disabilities. She is the senior author of the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales and is actively engaged in the revision of the Vineland, Vineland II. She is also co-editor (along with Drs. Ami Klin and Fred Volkmar) of a recent book on Asperger's syndrome. Her main research interests involve the assessment of adaptive behavior, autism spectrum disorders, mental retardation, child neuropsychology, and other developmental disabilities. Dr. Sparrow recently served on National Research Council, (National Academy of Sciences) Committee on Disability Determination for Mental Retardation. She was cofounder of the Journal of Child Neuropsychology and served as co-editor for five years. She recently received the Career Scientist Award from the American Academy of Mental Retardation.
Elisa Mambrino
Ph.D. in School Psychology from Columbia UniversityÕs Teachers College; Pre-doctoral internship in Clinical Neuropsychology and Rehabilitation Psychology at Mount Sinai Hospital and Mount Sinai School of Medicine; M.S. in Journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Dr. MambrinoÕs research explores the complex cognitive process of expository writing in young adults, using an approach that examines linguistic ability and neurocognitive factors, including working memory, metacognitive skills, associated long-term memory and social-cognitive perspective taking. She applies theory and methodology from both cognitive and social psychology, while acknowledging writing-related perspectives found in anthropology, classical rhetoric, cognitive developmental psychology, and psycholinguistics. Dr. MambrinoÕs work in the EG Lab focuses on the Connecticut Youth Detainee Program (CYDP). This randomized clinical trial of a cognitive-behavioral intervention is aimed at evaluating the feasibility, acceptability and effectiveness of Social Problem-Solving Training (SPST) in a sample of children and adolescents in the CYPD.
Donna Macomber
Donna earned her master's degree in psychology at Southern Connecticut State University. She has an A.S. in business administration and a B.A. in psychology: theory and research. Her current interests include psychological testing and assessment of children, cognition and intelligence testing.
Robyn Rissman
Robyn functions primarily as an editor for the various grants, papers, book chapters, and articles written by EGLab members. She received her bachelor's degree in English literature from The Colorado College and her professional background is primarily in magazine and newspaper publishing.
Jyothi Chintapalli
Jyothi Chintapalli has a double Masters degree in Biotechnology (Andhra University, India), and Cellular and Molecular Biology (University of New Haven, USA). She worked for Biogen Corporation as an intern and since then, is working as a Research Assistant-II with Yale. She has been doing cell and tissue culture, virology and molecular biology work. She has a couple of research papers and had taken part in presentations and seminars too. She is also a part-time lecturer in Biology at Manchester Community College.
Mei Tan
Mei Tan is from Berkeley, CA. She received her BA/BS in English and Biology from the College of William and Mary, where she wrote her thesis on language and identity in the work of Gertrude Stein. She earned her MA in Literature from the University of California at Berkeley, writing a thesis on the use of language and imagery in the poetry of John Ashbery, under the direction of poet Robert Hass. Currently a Research Assistant for the EGLab, Ms. Tan primarily works on the Aurora Project, helping to develop intelligence assessments and writing the accompanying manual.
Jerry Haeffel
Jerry Haeffel received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow in the EG lab. Jerry’s research program is devoted to delineating the full range of cognitive processes involved in the etiology, maintenance, and treatment of depression. He has extended the cognitive theories of depression by integrating research from cognitive psychology, social psychology, and affective science. He uses multiple research designs (cross-sectional, prospective, behavioral high-risk, and randomized trials) and measurement techniques (e.g., questionnaires, laboratory tasks, and diagnostic interviews) in studies of nondepressed, dysphoric, and clinically depressed adolescents and adults. Jerry’s work in the EG Lab is focused on the Connecticut Youth Detainee Program (CYDP) project. The primary goal of this project is to evaluate the feasibility, acceptability, and effectiveness of Social Problem-Solving Training (SPST) in a sample of children and adolescents in the CYDP.
Summer Seongmin Han
Summer is a graduate student at Yale majoring in Statistics. She started working with Dr.Grigorenko the spring semester in 2006. She's currently working on several gene-mapping projects: candidate-gene association studies on autism (finished MIF gene data recently and also working on more candidate genes);genomewide linkage analysis on multiple crime disease. She's doing data analysis and also interested in developing mathematical models for association and linkage studies.
Carolyn Yrigollen
Carolyn began working in the laboratory while she was an Undergraduate in Yale. For her senior year research project she genotyped Autistic individuals and their affected or non affected family members, using candidate genes. She graduated in 2004 with a BS in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology (Research Intensive). She now works as a Research Assistant, and is currently involved in several different research projects.
Luke Turechek
Luke Turechek is from Shelton, CT. He attended Dartmouth College and the Freie Universität Berlin, and received a degree in Biochemistry with a minor in German Studies. Luke is involved in projects researching the genetic basis of problems such as conduct disorder, autism and dyslexia.
Anna Kochetkova
Anna is from Riga, Latvia, where she graduated from the University of Latvia with a diploma of a mathematician-statistician. Now Anna is working on her Ph. D. thesis in the field of multi-trait oligogenic Bayesian linkage analysis at the Yale University Department of Statistics.
Adam Naples
Adam Naples is a graduate student in the lab. He is interested in the cognitive representations that give rise to individual differences in behavioral phenotypes. Specifically, his work focuses on the interaction between domains of expertise and representational preferences that might give rise to detectable and behaviorally relevant phenotypes.
Crystal Castaneda
Crystal is currently a freshman undergraduate at Yale University and undergoing her first year in the lab. She plans to major in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, and then hopes to attend medical school after graduating from Yale to pursue a career in pediatrics. She is presently gaining technical lab experience and familiarity with the Child Study Center’s genetics projects and research processes, and intends to pursue further study in the wet lab and participate in future independent research.
Robert Sanchez
Robert is an undergraduate at Yale majoring in the History of Science and Medicine and has just begun his work at the lab as a research assistant during his freshman year. While learning basic operations such as DNA quantification, extraction, and analysis, Robert is gradually gaining the tools needed to work more independently in the lab.
Sarah Ward
Sarah Ward is from Simsbury, CT. She has finished her freshman year at Brown University, where she is planning on majoring in psychology. She started working for the lab in the summer of 2005, as a research assistant on several different projects which focus on learning disorders.
George Rockwell
George Rockwell is an undergraduate at Antioch College, majoring in Environmental and Biological sciences. His work at the E.G. lab will be the final internship for Antioch's Co-op program. George is involved with learning all the lab protocols used for the genetic research done in the E.G. lab. Once George has finished learning all the techniques and protocols that are necessary he will begin his own project.
Lab Graduates
Douglas Hausladen
Douglas Hausladen began working in the Grigorenko laboratory in January or 2003 and continued until his graduation in May of 2004. He graduated with a degree in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. He started as a general laboratory assitant, but did an independent research project his senior year genotyping conduct disorder individuals. After hanging up his labcoat(graduation), Douglas started his own company and is now expanding his business in Florida and hopes to be national by 2008. (He can still be found at 2am on bad cable television commercials for furniture stores in the New Haven area).
Marya Getchell
Maya is an undergraduate at Yale majoring in Biology and has been working at the lab as a research assistant since her junior year. She is currently working on her senior project which involves genotyping adult conduct disorder individuals using single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) on several candidate genes. In addition to her independent research, she also performs basic data collection procedures such as DNA extraction, quantification, and analysis for other ongoing projects. She is now pursuing a graduate degree at the Harvard School of Public Health in Cambridge, MA.
Niamh (Neeve) Doyle
Niamh is from Dublin, Ireland, where she received a B.Ed in elementary school teaching (from St.Patricks College, DCU) and a B.Sc (from the Open University) in Psychology. Niamh taught in Irish elementary schools for 4.5 years, before teaching in Canberra, Australia for an additional year. She is currently working as research assistant for Dr. Grigorenko and Dr. Newman on numerous projects such as :A Family Study of Hyperlexia , Study of Adoptees from Russia (STAR study) and Students with Learning Difficulties and Creative/Visual-Spatial Gifts. She is based in the dry lab, so is also responsible for administrative aspects of the Grigorenko lab and the coordination of joint efforts with the PACE Clinic and PACE Center. Niamh is currently pursuing a graduate degree at Syracuse University.