Adrienne B
- Research Program Mentor

PhD candidate at University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill (UNC Chapel Hill)

Expertise

Emotions, Interoception and Body Awareness, Social and Affective Neuroscience, Social Psychology, Social Determinants of Health

Bio

My name is Adrienne (she/her) and I'm Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. I study why people differ in their experience of emotion. I'm most interested 1) how stressful life experience affect the brain and body, and 2) how these experience influence emotions. I am also interested what people think about their bodies, and how this influences the way they experience emotions. For fun, I love reading anything fiction, doing pilates, taking art classes, and watching a good true crime docu-series.

Project ideas

Project ideas are meant to help inspire student thinking about their own project. Students are in the driver seat of their research and are free to use any or none of the ideas shared by their mentors.

Writing a scientific review

In this project, you will write a scientific review-style paper on a topic related to psychology or neuroscience. Topics could range from "emotion regulation is adolescence" to "how does body awareness impact emotions?". This process will teach you how to find, access, and critically analyze existing scientific literature and how to assemble primary literature into a scientific review. You will gain skills in writing and editing, as well as an in-depth knowledge of your chosen research topic.

How does early life adversity “get under the skin”?

About 50% of teens in the U.S. report experiencing at least one adverse childhood event, including physical or emotional abuse, exposure to neighborhood violence, or poverty. Decades of research shows that exposure to adversity increases risk for clinical and physical disorders. But why? In this project, you would explore the physiological and psychological mechanisms that connect adversity to a clinical or physical disorder (e.g., anxiety symptoms, cardiovascular disease) using data from the Midlife in the United States project. You would learn how to formulate a research question, analyze data, and present your findings in a research paper in the form of an oral or written presentation.

Coding skills

R, bash shell scripting

Teaching experience

As a college student, I peer taught a 12-student course on theoretical approaches to service. Then, as a full-time research assistant, I mentored a team of 10 research assistants who helped me collect and analyze fMRI data. Now as a grad student, I co-mentor 15 research assistant who help us collect data; I also have helped 5 research assistants complete independent research projects, some of which turned into posters that the students presented at national academic conferences.