Meet the GGSC’s New Fellows 2016-17
August 25, 2016
The Greater Good Science Center is proud to present its 2016-17 class of Hornaday Graduate and Goldberg Undergraduate Fellows, which includes distinguished UC Berkeley students from the fields of psychology, public health, biology, education, business, and beyond. They are an outstanding group of young researchers who are committed to the greater good.
The GGSC’s annual fellowship program supports the work of UC Berkeley students whose research advances the science of compassion, empathy, and other topics we explore. The program attracts scholars from across a broad spectrum of academic disciplines, with a particular focus on the social-behavioral sciences.
This year, our fellows tackle subjects ranging from how to promote cooperation and reciprocity within social networks to how parenting practices during conflict impact children’s long-term development. Please read on for more details about our newest fellows, and visit our fellowships page for more details about the program and summaries of past graduate and undergraduate fellows’ work.
2016-2017 Graduate Fellows
Lindsay BahyamSociology
Lindsay Bayham is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Her research examines economic and social development in West Africa, focusing on the connections between development and social networks, culture, and financial behavior. Lindsay’s dissertation project investigates variation in the norms and practices surrounding relational obligations and informal financial exchange in Accra, Ghana, looking at how cultural and social context shape Ghanaians’ ideas about generosity and obligation. She has spent more than three years in Ghana since she first visited in 2007, including a stint as a Fulbright-Hays Fellow.
As a GGSC Graduate Research Fellow, Lindsay will implement a novel cross-cultural qualitative coding exercise, and conduct further interviews to understand how generosity and obligation are affected by policymakers’ and NGOs’ growing efforts to formalize economic behavior through savings and loans.
Sarah ChungClinical Science
Sara Chung is a fourth-year doctoral student in the Clinical Science program at UC Berkeley. She received her B.A. from UC Berkeley and her M.A. from Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research explores the influence of culture on the development of psychopathology and competence in children and adolescents via coping, appraisal, and family socialization. As a GGSC Graduate Research Fellow, Sara will investigate how parenting practices during parent-child conflict can impact children’s long-term development among Chinese American immigrant families. Her research aims to contribute to culturally competent interventions designed to facilitate open communication and cohesion among immigrant families.
Amanda Perez-CeballosSocial-Personality Psychology
Amanda Perez-Ceballos is a second-year Social-Personality doctoral student at UC Berkeley. She received her B.A. in Psychology at UC Berkeley. Her research revolves around implicit biases, prejudice, and the benefits of cross-group friendship. Specifically, her work looks at utilizing technology to foster online cross-group friendships as a means to reduce implicit biases. As a Greater Good Science Center Research Fellow, Amanda will systematically and empirically explore the potential role that the Internet can play in facilitating cross-group contact and friendships. She plans to study the underlying mechanisms and causal effects of the formation of positive online cross-group friendships.
Kimberly LongNeuroscience
Kimberly Long is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the lab of Daniela Kaufer in the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. Her work seeks to understand the neural basis of empathy and how the brain discriminates among conspecifics to target prosocial behavior towards members of one’s own group. Using a rodent model of helping behavior, her project will seek to uncover the developmental time point at which social discrimination arises. In addition, she will explore how early life stress affects motivation for helping behavior, ultimately providing a better understanding of how early life experience can shape human empathy.
2016-2017 Undergraduate Fellows
Hailey GordonMental Disabilities, Cognitive Neuroscience
Hailey Gordon’s research project will explore shared-attention mechanisms, which are thought to have wide-ranging implications for memory, motivation, judgment, emotion, and behavior. It will present validated emotionally evocative stimuli to either two participants together, or each individually, while acquiring electroencephalogram data (EEG) from sensors on the scalp. Using this dual EEG setting, Hailey aims to determine whether and how shared experience of elicited emotion measurably differs from solo experience within the context of well-established EEG indices of attention. After her senior year at UC Berkeley, she plans to continue research in the field of mental disabilities, specifically autism, molding together her coding and analysis skills and behavior results to develop groundbreaking and stimulating computer programs for individuals who exist in a world where their insightfulness could be considered untapped potential, rather than absent.
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Vivian LoPsychology
Vivian Lo is a fourth-year Psychology major and a research assistant with Professor Sameer Srivastava and Professor Dana Carney in the Haas School of Business. Her research project seeks to inform how to better accentuate the tendency for people to be cooperative in order to increase reciprocity within social networks. Furthermore, the project seeks to inform the development of better career preparation programs, and to contribute to the growing body of knowledge on promoting prosocial behavior in professional and organizational settings. She is interested in the areas of positive psychology, social networks, and organizational behavior, and will be pursuing a Ph.D. to study these topics.
