Yelina received her B.A. in Cognitive Science from the University of Pennsylvania. She is interested in decision making and peer influence in adolescence. Outside of the lab, she enjoys taking long walks, listening to audiobooks, and going down rabbit holes searching for environmental-friendly swaps for everyday things.

John is a research scientist working with Drs. Leah Somerville and Kate McLaughlin at Harvard University. He came here by way of the psychology Ph.D. program at the University of Oregon, and a B.A. in cognitive science at the University of California, Berkeley. John is interested in the development of decision-making and learning during adolescence, and how these processes, situated in the context of developmentally normative goals and adverse environments, contribute to mental and physical health. He is am passionate about statistical methodology, especially measurement and modeling task behavior, as well as scientific computing. John is a huge fan of R, Stan, and The Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science.

Katherine graduated from Boston College in 2014 with a B.S. in Psychology. She then worked as a Neuroscience Research Lab Manager at Stanford University under the guidance of Dr. Leanne Williams. Katherine is currently a PhD student in the Cognition, Brain & Behavior track at Harvard. She is interested in studying how neural circuitry gives rise to adolescent cognitive control and affective experience. Outside of lab, she likes to run 5Ks, lounge with her cats, and play cards!

Erik received his BS in Biology and Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin and spent the next several years working on neuroimaging studies of aging in the Johnson Neuroimaging Lab and the WADRAC neuroimaging group. At Harvard, Erik is in charge of a number of large-scale data analysis projects and serves as a lab generalist, ensuring that people have the resources they need to ask the questions they ask. When not at work, he is also a gardener (during the growing season) and homebrewer (all the year round). As a kid, Erik was obsessed with dinosaurs.

Erik hails from the town of Schaller, Iowa, but he also spent time in South Africa and Australia while growing up. Erik's research focuses on interactions between language and emotion. He's interested in understanding how emotion words influence how we regulate and represent emotions. He received his B.A. in psychology from Columbia University, where he worked with Prof. Kevin Ochsner and Dr. Ajay Satpute, and after graduating, Erik served as the lab manager for Prof. Jamil Zaki at Stanford University. Erik is currently a Clinical Science PhD student at Harvard, with Prof. Matt Nock as a secondary advisor, and in his graduate work, Erik has extended the study of language and emotion into the developmental and clinical domains. For example, he's interested in understanding how children and teens develop their ability to differentiate emotions and what this means for mental health.