Sarah Watamura is the director of the CHaD lab. She is an Associate Professor at DU. After training with Dr. Megan Gunnar at the University of Minnesota's Institute of Child Development she received her Ph.D. from the Department of Human Development at Cornell University. She has long-standing interests in children's physiologic regulation, their development within care giving contexts, and relations between physiologic regulation and developing physical and psychological stress. She has recently expanded her work to include the unique stressors and buffers that may be important for physiologic stress among families experiencing poverty and among newcomer Mexican-origin families.
E-mail: swatamura@psy.du.edu

Irena Pikovsky is a fifth year graduate student in the developmental psychology PhD program. For her master's thesis she investigated relationships between cortisol, early environmental risk, and the 5-HTTLPR genotype in preschool age children. Currently she is looking at longitudinal relationships among these variables and health outcomes using the ALSPAC dataset. Irena is generally interested in how individual risk factors impact stress physiology in early childhood.
E-mail: ipikovsk@du.edu

Marina Mendoza worked in the lab as a project manager for 2 years. She is now a student in the DU developmental psychology PhD program.  With her research experience she hopes to continue exploring relationships between physiologic stress reactivity and care giving environments in preschool children.  Another area of interest for her is looking at physiologic stress regulation in children living in low socioeconomic environments.
E-mail: mmendoza@psy.du.edu

Eliana Hurwich-Reiss is a second year student in the clinical psychology PhD program.  Eliana’s primary interests involve research and clinical work with diverse populations, in particular Latino immigrant parents and children.  One of her goals is to help fill the gap in research and service delivery to low-income Latino families. For her master’s thesis she worked on the cultural and language adaptation of a parenting, relationship, and stress and coping psycho-educational intervention designed for low-income Spanish speaking families.  She then conducted a pilot study to assess the preliminary feasibility, acceptability and efficacy of the program with Spanish speaking Head Start families in the Denver area.
E-mail: ehurwich@du.edu

Lisa McFadyen-Ketchum is a first year graduate student in the developmental psychology PhD program.  She has 8 years combined research experience in molecular developmental neuroscience. Lisa is generally interested in risk and resilience in infants and toddlers with a particular emphasis on school readiness. In the Watamura lab she will explore the relationship between physiologic stress reactivity and developmental trajectories in early childhood and assist on an upcoming project examining the role of parents in buffering their children from stress. While at DU she hopes to merge her previous work with animal models, and her current training with the goal of generating cross-disciplinary translational research.
E-mail: lisa.mcfadyen-ketchum@du.edu