People

Marion K. Underwood

Email: underwm@purdue.edu
Download Marion Underwood’s Curriculum Vitae

As of August 1, 2018, Marion Underwood is now at Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana, where she serves as the Dean of the College of Health and Human Sciences and Distinguished Professor of Psychological Sciences.

Underwood’s research focuses on how children develop peer relationships. Her work investigates the developmental origins of socially aggressive behavior and the associated outcomes for victims as well as aggressors. Her longitudinal study of children’s relationships and social development follows the same group of students from third grade through high school. As the students in her study grew up, it became clear that electronic communication had become an enormous part of their social lives. Underwood adapted her study to capture this important aspect of the students’ social development. In the eighth grade, these students were given BlackBerry phones, enabling the research team to analyze electronic communication and learn more about evolving relationships among young people.

The overall aim of this research program is to clarify developmental precursors of adolescent psychopathology for both girls and boys, with the long-term goal of developing prevention efforts not only for social and physical aggression, but also for internalizing problems, personality disorders and eating disorders. In 2001, Underwood was awarded the Chancellor’s Council Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award. She has authored many journal articles and two books: Social Aggression Among Girls and Social Development: Relationships in Infancy, Childhood, and Adolescence (with Lisa Rosen).

Underwood was awarded fellow status by the Association for Psychological Science, an honor given to prominent psychologists who have made sustained, outstanding contributions to the science of psychology in such areas as research, teaching, service and application. She received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Wellesley College. She earned master’s and doctoral degrees in clinical psychology from Duke University. Underwood joined Reed College in 1991 and transitioned to UT Dallas in 1998.

Current Research Team

Doctoral Students

Allycen Kurup

Allycen (she/they) is a clinical psychology doctoral candidate at Purdue University. She joined the lab at UT Dallas during the Summer 2017 semester, and moved with Dr. Underwood to Purdue in Summer 2018. She received her BS in psychology from the University of Washington, in Seattle, Washington. During her undergraduate career, she studied children's implicit and explicit attitudes of race and gender, and spent some time in her post-baccalaureate years working in a community-based study of early detection and intervention for autism. Allycen's current research interests focus on the ways in which adolescents and emerging adults explore their gender and sexuality via digital communication, and how these behaviors relate to social and mental health. In the future, she hopes to work with LGBTQ+ youth to promote healthy identity development and support online and offline.

Undergraduate Research Assistants (RAs)

Sydney Godwin

Katie Hatfield

Lillian Magid

Past Research Team

Co-Investigators

Robert A. Ackerman

Email: raa110030@utdallas.edu
Dr. Ackerman’s profile on the BBS site
Download Robert Ackerman’s Curriculum Vitae

Dr. Ackerman is an Associate Professor of Psychology in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at The University of Texas at Dallas. Dr. Ackerman’s research program investigates how the quality of interpersonal relationships (e.g., roommate relationships, romantic relationships) is impacted by the characteristics of the individuals that comprise them. He received his PhD in social and personality psychology from Michigan State University in 2011, and he began his appointment as an assistant professor at The University of Texas at Dallas in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences in August of 2011. Because Dr. Ackerman’s substantive interests involve processes that occur within relationships and therefore often involve non-independent data, he is particularly interested in analytic models for both cross-sectional (e.g., Ackerman, Kashy, & Corretti, 2015) and longitudinal dyadic data (e.g., Ackerman, Donnellan, Kashy, & Conger, 2012).

Kurt Beron

Email: kberon@utdallas.edu
Visit Dr. Beron's website
Download Dr. Beron's Curriculum Vitae

Dr. Beron is a professor in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences (previously, Social Sciences) and teaches in Economics and in Public Policy at The University of Texas at Dallas. Dr. Beron’s research is in cross-disciplinary applications of quantitative methodology. He has worked on projects spanning economics, education, sociology, and, most recently, psychology, and his research has often focused on public policy issues. Dr. Beron’s current research agenda focuses on the human capital development of children and young adults and their effects on later outcomes, but emphasizes the traditionally non-economic factors that affect this development. His empirical work seeks the understanding of situations that involve unobservable and latent variables using econometric and statistical techniques such as qualitative and limited dependent variable models, structural equation modeling and multilevel modeling.

Past Post-Doctoral Research Fellows

Madeleine George

Madeleine George is a former post-doctoral fellow whose research focused on how adolescents’ and young adults’ usage of digital technologies was related to their wellbeing. She currently works with RTI International in their Center for Advanced Methods Development. Email: mgeorge@rti.org or madeleine.j.george@gmail.com.

Justin Vollet

Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
University of Texas of the Permian Basin

Samuel E. Ehrenreich

Assistant Professor
Human Development and Family Studies
University of Nevada, Reno
https://www.unr.edu/education/faculty-and-staff/human-development-and-family-studies/sam-ehrenreich

Diana J. Meter

Assistant Professor
Human Development and Family Studies
Utah State University
http://hdfs.usu.edu/people/faculty/meter-diana

Past Doctoral Students

Kaitlyn Burnell

Kaitlyn Burnell is a Research Assistant Professor with the Winston National Center on Technology Use, Brain and Psychological Development. She received her Ph.D. in Psychological Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas, with a concentration in developmental psychology. Her research adapts a developmental focus to study how adolescents and emerging adults use digital technologies, including social media and smartphones. Kaitlyn’s research examines the associations between digital technology use and a wide array of psychosocial outcomes, including well-being and mental health, body image, and risky behavior such as substance use. She has a special interest in applying cutting edge methodological approaches to study these linkages, such as the use of passive sensing, eye-tracking, and observational coding. In her free time, she enjoys biking, paddle boarding, reading, and hanging out with her husband, Jake, and dog, JP. Email: burnellk@unc.edu

Past Undergraduate, Post-Baccalaureate, and Master's RAs