researchers

​JACQUELYNNE S. ECCLES

Director, Achievement Research Lab
jseccles@uci.edu
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Jacquelynne Eccles is the Wilbert McKeachie Collegiate Professor of Psychology, Women’s Studies and Education, as well as a research scientist at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. Over the last 30 years, she has conducted research on a wide variety of topics including gender-role socialization, teacher expectancies, classroom influences on student motivation and social development in the family and school context. Much of this work has focused on the adolescent periods of life when health-compromising behaviors such as smoking dramatically increase.

Dr. Eccles has served as the past chair of the Advisory Committee for the Social, Behavioral and Economic Directorate at the National Science Foundation. She is a member of the MacArthur Foundation Network on Successful Adolescent Development and Chair of the MacArthur Foundation on Successful Pathways through Middle Childhood. Dr. Eccles has been the associate editor of Child Development and is co-author of Women and Sex-Roles and Managing to Succeed. She received her Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1974. Dr. Eccles has served on the faculty at Smith College, the University of Colorado, and the University of Michigan. More about Dr. Eccles' research interests can be found on the RCGD Primary Research Staff page.

This information is taken from the biography presented at the White House Conference on Teenagers.

Meeta Banerjee

Research Fellow, Achievement Research Lab
mbanerje@umich.edu
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Meeta Banerjee is a postdoctoral research fellow working in the Achievement Research Lab with Dr. Eccles. She is also a Pathways to Adulthood postdoctoral fellow, which is an international postdoctoral fellowship program investigating youth development. Meeta is a native of Flint, Michigan and received her B.A. in Psychology ; her Masters in Social Work from the University of Michigan;  and her Ph.D. in Ecological-Community Psychology from Michigan State University in 2012. Her research employs both integrative and ecological frameworks to understand the influence of contextual factors on early and late adolescent developmental trajectories in ethnic minority families. She is especially interested in exploring the interaction between ecological contexts (e.g., schools, families, neighborhoods, racial discrimination, and communities) and racial socialization practices and processes. Moreover, Meeta investigates how these factors are both directly and indirectly related to mental health and educational outcomes in ethnic minority youth.

Oksana Malanchuk

Research Investigator, Achievement Research Lab
oksana@umich.edu
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​Research interests have centered on social identities, their development, and their outcomes. Recent work has focused on occupational aspirations and identities, looking at the ontogeny of career identities in adolescence, the interplay between occupational aspirations and achievement, as well as their impact on later psychological and behavioral outcomes. Her research in contemporary Ukraine is concentrated on understanding relevant and shifting social identifications, especially among the young. Current research interests focus on the longitudinal study of the socialization of racial/ethnic identity.

Steve Peck

Assistant Research Scientist, Achievement Research Lab
link@umich.edu
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Steve Peck received his B.A. in Psychology from the California State University, Long Beach in 1985; his M.A. in Experimental Social Psychology from the University of Montana, Missoula in 1990; and his Ph.D. in Personality Psychology from the University of Michigan in 1995. His research interests include the study of adolescent development in context, focusing on the combined influences of content, structure, and processes at the personal (e.g., implicit, explicit, and phenomenological) and environmental (e.g., family, school, peers, and neighborhood) levels. He is also interested in the application of pattern-oriented methodological approaches to the study of person's in context.

affiliate researchers

Amanda Brodish

Research Fellow, Achievement Research Lab
abrodish@umich.edu
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Amanda Brodish received her B.A. in Psychology from Boston College in 2000 and her Ph.D. in Social Psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2007. Amanda is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Achievement Research Lab. Her research focuses on how gender, race, and aspects of the social context (e.g., stereotypes, perceptions of discrimination) affect academic performance, motivation, and career choices. In addition, Amanda is interested in how people construe issues of race and the impact of these construals on thoughts, feelings, and social behaviors.

Courtney D. Cogburn

Research Fellow, Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies
ccogburn@hsph.harvard.edu
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Dr. Courtney D. Cogburn is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow working with Dr. Jacque Eccles and the Achievement Research Lab. She will also work with the Social Neuroscience of Health Disparities research group housed at ISR. Dr. Cogburn received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in the Combined Program in Education and Psychology (CPEP) and her undergraduate degree from University of Virginia (Wahoo Wah!). As a postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Cogburn will continue her work examining perceptions of and adaptive responses to race-related risk among African American adolescents, extending her focus to consider shifts in adaptive and maladaptive cognitive responses to risk into adulthood. Dr. Cogburn is also examining qualitative features of the ways adolescents discuss and think about race (e.g. language choice, experiential references and focus). In this line of her work, she utilizes mixed methodological approaches to help youth explore complex social phenomena and promote critical thinking and perspective taking. She is a native of Oklahoma and currently splits her time between Ann Arbor and Chicago, where she lives with her husband and their boxer, Cassius.

Bonnie Barber

Murdoch University, School of Psychology
B.Barber@murdoch.edu.au
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Bonnie Barber's research focuses on adolescent and young adult development with a primary emphasis on the role of life transitions in influencing individual development and adjustment. What accounts for individual differences in adolescents' and young adults' interests, positive and risky activity involvement, psychological adjustment, school performance, and educational, vocational, and interpersonal life choices and plans? How do adolescent experiences at school, home, work, and with peers and partners relate to young adult life paths? Working with the MSALT data, Dr. Barber has several paths of related research: 1) Young adult life transitions and psychological well-being, 2) socialization influences on identity development, 3) adolescent development in divorced families; 4) development/evaluation of a preventive intervention program for divorced mothers and their adolescents; and 5) temporal rhythms in adolescent moods.

Tabbye Chavous

Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan
tchavous@umich.edu
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​Tabbye Chavous' research interests include issues of person-environment fit and minority student development, particularly the impact of institutional policies, structures and climate on the educational and life experiences of African Americans in both secondary and higher education settings.

Pamela Davis-Kean

Associate Research Professor, Research Center for Group Dynamics
pdakean@umich.edu
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Pamela Davis-Kean received her Ph.D. in social/developmental psychology at Vanderbilt University in 1996. Her research focuses on the development of self-esteem over the lifespan; the impact of parental education attainment on children; the role that families, schools, and significant figures play in the development of children; and why gender plays a role in IT occupations. Davis-Kean also has expertise in methodology and statistics primarily focusing on psychometric properties of questionnaires. Integral in this research is the theoretical understanding of the development of the self and identity formation in young children and how methods need to be created and better utilized to obtain information on the self over the lifespan. Davis-Kean is also a member of the NICHD Network on Child and Family Well-Being which address the issues of how developmental research can impact on policy.

Jennifer Fredricks

Associate Professor of Human Development, Director of the Holleran Center for Community Action and Public Policy, Connecticut College
jfred@conncoll.edu
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Jennifer Fredricks received her B.A. in Psychology from Columbia University and her Ph.D. in Education and Psychology from the University of Michigan in 1999. She is currently an assistant professor in Human Development at Connecticut College. Her research focuses on the development of motivation in school and non-school activities, gender differences in math and sports, and the consequences of extracurricular participation.

Fani Lauerman

Postdoctoral Research Fellow
fanim@umich.edu
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Fani Lauermann is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. She obtained her doctoral degree from the Combined Program in Education and Psychology at the University of Michigan in 2013. She is interested in the motivational underpinnings of educational and professional choices. Two overarching questions guiding her research include (a) what factors motivate teachers to provide high quality educational opportunities to their students, as well as (b) what factors motivate students to take advantage of such opportunities.

Arnold J. Sameroff

Director, Center for Development and Mental Health, University of Michigan
sameroff@umich.edu
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Arnold Sameroff is a developmental psychologist with a primary interest in the factors that contribute to mental health and psychopathology. He is engaged in a number of longitudinal projects with infants, school-age children, and adolescents, studying the effects of family, community, school and peer group on social-emotional and academic success. Using an ecological model of development, he is examining the transactional relations between child characteristics and parent childrearing behavior and belief systems, and between parent characteristics and their ethnic, socioeconomic, and neighborhood backgrounds.

Kai Schnabel Cortina

Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan
schnabel@umich.edu
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Kai Schnabel received his Ph.D. in Educational Psychology at the Free University Berlin, Germany. His major research interests include motivational development in adolescents in the context of schooling and the impact of school experience on the school-to-work transition. Multivariate statistical approaches in empirical research is another focus of his research and teaching (in particular: Structural Equation Modeling and Hierarchical Linear Modeling).

Sandi Simpkins

Associate Professor, Arizona State University, The Sanford School
Sandra.simpkins@asu.edu 
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Sandi Simpkins received her doctorate in Developmental Psychology from the University of California, Riverside in 2000. Her research has examined children's peer relationships, after-school activities, and the links between developmental contexts, such as the family context, and children's relationships and activities. Currently, she is conducting analyses on the Childhood and Beyond (CAB) data set, which follows children from kindergarten through high school. With this data set, she has focused on describing children's formal and informal after-school activities across development and examining child and parental correlates of these activities.

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Janice Templeton

Associate Professor, Fort Lewis College, Psychology
templeton_j@fortlewis.edu
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Janice Templeton received her M.A. in General Experimental Psychology from Wake Forest University and is recent PhD graduate in the Combined Program in Education and Psychology. She is now an assistant professor at Fort Lewis College. Her research interests include social, emotional and psychological factors that promote positive development in adolescence and in the transition to adulthood with an emphasis on spiritual development.

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Katja Upadyaya

Research Fellow
kmarian@umich.edu
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Katja Upadyaya received her Ph.D. in 2007 from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Katja is a research investigator at the Achievement Research Lab. Her research focuses on teacher-student interaction, STEM, causal attributions and beliefs, and engagement in studies and work. In addition, Katja is interested in educational- and work-transitions and how they are reflected in one's motivation, engagement, adjustment, and well-being.

helen watt

Monash University, Faculty of Education
Helen.watt@education.monash.edu.au
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Helen Watt received her PhD from the University of Sydney in 2002, and is currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of Western Sydney in educational psychology and quantitative methods. She is interested in affective, cognitive and social bases for academic choices and has developed two large-scale longitudinal research programs on this. The first investigates (1) gendered achievement-related outcomes in math and English for Australian secondary school students; (2) key social-cognitive predictors of those outcomes; (3) interrelations between predictors over time; and (4) qualitative exploration of sources for gendered math self-perceptions. The second program is in collaboration with Dr Paul Richardson from Monash University and investigates (1) motivations for selecting teaching as a career; (2) teaching self-efficacy; and (3) experiences of beginning teachers. She is undertaking a postdoctoral fellowship July 03-04 at the University of Michigan working with Professor Jacquelynne Eccles on aspects of the Expectancy-Value model.

Allan Wigfield

Professor, Dept. of Human Development, University of Maryland
awigfiel@umd.edu 
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Allan Wigfield's research has focused on the development and socialization of children's achievement motivation in different areas. In several large-scale, longitudinal studies he and his colleagues have examined how children's motivation develops across the elementary school years, into and through middle school, and into high school.
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In the literacy area, Dr. Wigfield has done research on the development of children's motivation for reading, and how different instructional practices influence children's reading motivation. He has developed new measures of reading motivation in this work, and has examined how children's reading motivation relates to the amount of reading that they do, and their reading achievement.

Ming-Te Wang

Assistant Professor at University of Pittsburgh and Adjunct Research Faculty at Survey Research Center, University of Michigan
mtwang@pitt.edu
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Ming-Te Wang received his Ph. D. in Human Development and Psychology at Harvard University in 2010. His research focuses on the impact of academic and social domains of school climate on adolescents' achievement beliefs and school engagement and the role that family, school, and community environments play in the social, emotional, and behavioral development of youth from diverse socio-economic and cultural contexts. He is also interested in the application of variable- and person-centered methodological approaches to psychological and educational research.