LEARN Mentorship Program | Supported by the Jacobs Foundation

Roya Abbasi-Asl, Ph.D., is a Research Assistant Professor at the Institute for Applied Research in Youth Development at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University. Her research focuses on understanding three key sources of variability—within-person, within-group, and contextual—in the learning and development of children and youth, including moral and character development and social-emotional learning, and how these variabilities affect their health, well-being, and overall thriving. Her goal is to provide child and youth development organizations in LMICs—such as Thanda in South Africa, Compassion International (currently operating in 29 majority world countries), and CoSchool in Colombia—with actionable insights, enabling them to create person-specific interventions that empower every young person to thrive.

Dr. Philip Baiden is an accomplished academic, researcher, and educator, currently serving as an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Texas at Arlington, and as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Research on Adolescence. His career centers on advancing the well-being of vulnerable and marginalized populations, with a research focus on social determinants of health, adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), suicide prevention, adolescent mental health, and youth well-being in Sub-Saharan Africa. Dr. Baiden’s research interests address urgent and complex issues in contemporary social work, including the long-term effects of early adversity, adolescent risk behaviors, and cross-cultural mental health disparities. He is particularly interested in designing and evaluating social interventions that improve outcomes for children and youth involved in welfare and juvenile justice systems. Highly skilled in quantitative research, Dr. Baiden works extensively with large-scale secondary datasets and conducts rigorous intervention studies.

Catalina Canizares, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Fellow/Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Psychology at NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Her research focuses on reducing suicide ideation and attempts among adolescents by applying her expertise in data science and statistical programming in R. She specializes in using large-scale public datasets to train and test machine learning algorithms to predict suicide attempts in high school populations. Catalina's work is inherently interdisciplinary, involving collaborations with psychologists, social workers, and biostatisticians. Her goal is to harness the power of publicly funded data to advance the field of suicidology through the use of innovative statistical methods. She currently leads research projects under the A Research Center for Adolescent Interdisciplinary Approaches (ARCADIA) for Suicide Prevention, where she investigates environmental influences on suicidal behaviors, the effects of missing data and imputation in modeling with census data, and the development of robust data management systems. As part of ARCADIA, Catalina is developing an R package that includes curated datasets from all timepoints of a randomized controlled trial, alongside reproducible functions to facilitate analysis. She also led the development of the open-source R package for the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System. This package transforms the static data repository into a dynamic, user-friendly system by including cleaned datasets and comprehensive tutorials to support users throughout the analytic process.

Juan Camilo Cristancho is a Colombian Ph.D. candidate in Education (Educational Policy and Social Context) at the University of California, Irvine. His research centers on early childhood development and education in global contexts, with a particular focus on how exposure to community violence shapes children’s cognitive and socioemotional outcomes. He also studies the development and evaluation of early childhood education policies. His work has been published in Child Development, the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, and other peer-reviewed journals. Before beginning his doctoral studies, Juan Camilo worked as a researcher at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, and served as a consultant for the Inter-American Development Bank. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics, as well as a master’s degree in public policy, all from Universidad de los Andes.

Juan Del Toro, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He received his Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology with a concentration in Advanced Quantitative Analyses from New York University, and he completed his postdoctoral training at the University of Pittsburgh. As a developmental psychologist, Dr. Del Toro distinguishes between perpetrators of racial discrimination and racial socialization to inform setting-specific policies and interventions working to improve the well-being of all youth. His work has led to 60 peer-reviewed publications, many of which are first-authored articles in PNAS, JAMA Pediatrics, American Psychologist, Child Development, JAACAP, and American Journal of Epidemiology. Del Toro has also received numerous awards, including APA Div. 7’s Boyd McCandless Award, APS ’Janet Taylor Spence Award, SRA’s Social Policy Publication Award, and AERA’s Palmer Johnson Memorial Award.

Catalina Rey-Guerra, Ph.D., holds a Ph.D. in Applied Developmental and Educational Psychology and an M.S. in Human Development from Boston College, as well as an M.S. in Public Policy and Economics from Universidad de los Andes in Colombia. Her research focuses on early childhood development and parenting in global contexts, with a particular emphasis on Latin America and the Caribbean. She is especially interested in exploring gender disparities in pre-academic skills and examining the roles of gender-differentiated maternal, paternal, and caregiver engagement in promoting early learning opportunities for children.

Dr. David Torres Irribarra is a psychologist from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and holds a Ph.D. in Education from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on measurement in the social sciences, particularly the application of item response theory in educational contexts. He has served as Director of Information Technologies at the BEAR Center at UC Berkeley and is currently an associate professor in the School of Psychology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. David has worked as a senior psychometrics consultant for national assessments in Chile, including the redesign of the university admissions test (DEMRE), early childhood surveys (UNICEF/Ministry of Social Development), and the assessment of personal and social development (ACE). He has also contributed to international projects in Latin America and the U.S. His research spans latent variable modeling, the theoretical foundations of measurement, and the use of digital technologies in educational assessment.

Songtian (Tim) Zeng, Ph.D., received his PhD in special education from the University of Washington in Seattle and he is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA). His research focuses on early intervention and assessment for students with autism and other neurological disabilities. He takes a “Whole Child” approach that integrates evidence-based practices from both education and mental health disciplines. To support “Whole Child” education, Zeng's research agenda centers on evidence-based practices, teacher and parent training, and program quality improvement. These three lines of research are grounded in his belief that evidence-based practices (EBPs) can impact student outcomes if implemented with fidelity by well-prepared educators in high-quality inclusive settings. He has supported program evaluation and quantitative data analysis in a number of federally and state-funded research projects at the University of Washington Childcare Quality and Early Learning Center for Research and Professional Development, the National Ce

Sudha Arunachalam, Ph.D., is a Professor of Communicative Sciences and Disorders at New York University. She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics and M.A. in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, and a B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Southern California. In her research program, she examines how infants, toddlers, and preschoolers acquire language. She studies acquisition in children who are developing typically, autistic children, and children with late language emergence. In collaborations with researchers around the world, she has studied these issues in languages other than English, including German, ASL, Mandarin, and Korean. This interdisciplinary work integrates insights from the fields of communication disorders, linguistics, and cognitive and developmental psychology, and it involves several behavioral methods with a focus on eye-tracking. She was previously an Editor of the Language section of the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, and she is the current Editor-in-Chief of the journal Language Acquisition. She is an ASHA fellow.

Flóra Faragó, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in Human Development and Family Studies at Stephen F. Austin State University. Flóra has a background in developmental psychology and early childhood education. She was born in Budapest, Hungary and moved to Texas in 1998, where she earned her B.A. and M.S. degrees in Psychology at the University of Texas at Dallas and her Ph.D. in Family and Human Development from Arizona State University in 2016. Her teaching and research interests center around children’s racial and gender prejudice and stereotype development, anti-bias and anti-racist curricula and parenting, and inclusive early childhood education surrounding race and gender. Dr. Faragó is particularly interested in the link between research and community activism. She volunteers and conducts research with community agencies and colleagues in Kenya. She collaborates with colleagues and organizations nationally and internationally, including the Indigo Cultural Center, Local to Global Justice, the Jirani Project, and the Girl Child Network. You can learn more about Flóra’s work at www.florafarago.com.

María Fernanda Piñeros-Leaño, Ph.D., is a Colombian-born Associate Professor at the Boston College School of Social Work and a Faculty Affiliate at both the Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society and the Institute of Early Childhood Policy. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Work, Master of Public Health, Master of Social Work, and a B.S. in Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Piñeros-Leaño is the founding director of the MACONDO Research Lab, where she leads interdisciplinary, community-engaged research focused on improving health and mental health outcomes for migrant and immigrant families in the U.S. and Latin America. Her work has been supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Hilton Foundation, among others. She has authored over 60 peer-reviewed publications and multiple book chapters on topics including perinatal mental health, cultural adaptations of evidence-based mental health interventions, cultural stress, and trauma-informed care. A committed mentor and educator, Dr. Piñeros-Leaño has guided numerous doctoral and master’s students and serves on editorial boards and national committees advancing equity in research. Her long-term goal is to reduce mental health disparities through culturally responsive, community-engaged, evidence-based interventions. As a Mentor for the LEARN Program, she brings deep expertise in global mental health, a passion for inclusive scholarship, and a strong commitment to supporting early-career researchers.

Zoe Taylor, Ph.D., is an associate professor in Human Development and Family Science at Purdue University. Her mixed-method program of research examines sociocultural, environmental, and behavioral factors that contribute to psychosocial stress and health disparities in minoritized families, especially those disproportionately impacted by poverty including immigrant and single-mother families. Her first line of research is focused on how Latine children and adolescents from predominantly rural, immigrant, and migrant families cope with stress, and the effects of stress on mental health and well-being. Her second research area addresses key strengths and protective factors contributing to the mental health of primary caregivers, in particular for single mothers. She is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Research on Adolescence and a Consulting Editor for the Journal of Family Psychology and the Journal of Early Adolescence. She is a Fulbright-Schuman Scholar, and served on the Psychosocial Development, Risk, and Prevention NIH study section. Her research has been funded by the National Institute of Minority Health Disparities (NIMHD); the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD); the United States Department of Agriculture; and the Spencer Foundation.

Rebecca White, Ph.D., (she/her or they/them) is a Professor in the School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University (ASU). Her program of research, which examines Latin American origin U.S. adolescents’ development within cultural, political, neighborhood, and family contexts, has been funded by the William T. Grant Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation. Rebecca has published work that examines the intersecting implications of national policy, residential segregation, culture, and parenting for youth well-being and social-emotional and social-cognitive development in numerous outlets, including American Psychologist, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, and JAMA Pediatrics. Rebecca has also contributed methodological advances that help to define the characteristics and features of higher-quality scientific inquiry, especially with populations who have been underserved by the psychological and developmental sciences, including Latin American origin U.S. families and immigrants. Rebecca enthusiastically engages in mentoring trainees, as well as early and mid-career scholars. She has served on numerous editorial boards, most recently as the Interim Editor in Chief of Child Development Perspectives.