Susan Benear
Susan is a third year graduate student in the Cognition and Neuroscience program. She graduated from Penn State in 2015 with a B.A. in psychology and public relations and went on to spend a year teaching middle school language arts in Nashville through Teach for America. After working the following year as a research assistant in Dr. Isabel Gauthier’s visual perception lab at Vanderbilt, she began her Ph.D. work at Temple in 2017 and is co-mentored by Drs. Nora Newcombe and Ingrid Olson. Susan studies memory development and is interested in the concurrent maturation of semantic and episodic memory in early childhood and the effects of socioeconomic status on development, from both neural and behavioral perspectives.
tuh38197@temple.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Elias Blinkoff
Elias is a third-year graduate student in developmental psychology working with Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek. He received his B.A. in Psychology and Educational Studies from Swarthmore College in 2017, where he worked with Dr. Daniel Grodner to research sentence processing. Before arriving at Temple, Elias mentored 7th-grade students in the School District of Philadelphia through City Year. He currently pursues research at the intersection of developmental psychology and education with interest in the connections between the science of learning, classroom instruction, and education policy. Elias works on “The 6 Cs Go to School” project, which brings the 6 Cs of learning identified by Dr. Hirsh-Pasek and Dr. Roberta Golinkoff – collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creativity, and confidence – into elementary school classrooms via playful learning principles in partnership with educational administrators and teachers. His newest area of “6 Cs” research explores how the same skills apply in higher education. Elias also conducts research on the relation between inquiry and vocabulary development in preschool literacy instruction.
elias.blinkoff@temple.edu
Katherine Eulau
Katherine is a first-year graduate student in Developmental Psychology working with Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek. She received her B.A. in Behavioral Neuroscience from the University of San Diego, then went on to study Speech, Language, and Learning at Northwestern University where she earned a clinical master’s degree. As an undergraduate student, she studied mutually responsive orientation in caregiver-child dyads with Dr. Adriana Molitor at the University of San Diego and as a graduate student, she supported projects on parent coaching and early language intervention and assessment as a part of Dr. Megan Roberts’ Early Intervention Research Group at Northwestern. Katherine then went on to practice Speech Language Pathology in the pediatric population based in outpatient clinics and through in-home early intervention services. Katherine’s passion lies at the intersection of early interaction and play development as facilitative factors for language development.
katherine.eulau@temple.edu
Ally Masters
Ally is a first-year graduate student in developmental psychology working with Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek. She received her B.A. in Counseling Psychology from The College of Santa Fe in 2007, and then taught Montessori preschool and English as a second language in the Czech Republic, Vietnam, and the Ukraine. Under the mentorship of Dr. Margaret Friend, Ally received her M.A. in Psychology from San Diego State University in 2019, and her master’s thesis examined the quality of parent-child interaction and its impact on child expressive vocabulary in English- and Spanish-speakers. Ally’s research interests include how aspects of play support language development, and is particularly interested in how this varies across speakers of different languages.
tul04030@temple.edu
Kim Nguyen
Kim is a graduate student in the Cognition and Neuroscience department and is mentored by Dr. Nora Newcombe and Dr. Ingrid Olson. She received her B.S. in Neurobiology at the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. At UT, she worked with Dr. Alison Preston and Dr. Hannah Roome on research spanning spatial navigation, episodic memory, and schema formation in children. At Temple, she is interested in the development of episodic and spatial memory and using MRI methods to examine brain structures related to behavior.
Naoya Tani
Naoya is a graduate student in the Developmental Psychology area, co-mentored by Drs. Nora Newcombe and Ingrid Olson. He received his B.S. in Human Development and B.A. in Psychology with a minor in Education from University of California, Davis, in 2017. He previously worked at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center as a clinical research coordinator working with the population with Fragile X Syndrome and Autism. At Temple, he is interested in episodic memory development using both the behavioral and neuroimaging approaches, such as fMRI. In his free time, he enjoys eating, exploring Philly, and listening to music.
CV | LinkedIn
