Check out the photos below to see our team and their paintings!
Check out the photos below to see our team and their paintings!
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CARE Lab member Jenifer Guadalupe Solano Becerra has been awarded the 2024 Research for the Common Good Award through the Institute for Social Concerns for her work addressing the needs of marginalized and immigrant communities. With her award grant funding, Jenifer conducted research that explored how trauma-responsive, bilingual social work interventions impact socioemotional resilience and family stability in immigrant households.
Her interviews with social workers across Nebraska and direct work with Spanish-speaking families highlights the power of culturally attuned, trust-based care in promoting community well-being. Beyond research, Jenifer designed and led an eight-week Spanish-language summer learning program for newly arrived immigrant students to meet the needs of immigrant families in the Lincoln community and foster confidence and connection.
We are incredibly proud of Jenifer and her dedication to research and community engagement!
Read her full story here: Researching for the Common Good: Jenifer Guadalupe Solano Becerra
]]>This project explores what helps parents and children thrive. The project aims to learn more about how individual factors, like well-being and personality, along with family relationships and neighborhood contexts, work together to shape resilience in families. By studying parents and children together, we hope to uncover what really supports family growth and well-being.We are excited to begin this important work!
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Throughout the summer, Panther was trained on LAND (Lot Level Assessment of Neighborhood Disorder) coding, which involves evaluating neighborhood conditions such as upkeep, litter, and graffiti using Google Street View. Panther presented his work at the Galvin Scholars Poster Session, where he shared what he learned about research, coding, and neighborhoods. Through this experience, he strengthened his research skills, attention to detail, and deepened his interest in how communities support resilience.
We loved having Panther in the lab this summer. Panther’s enthusiasm and positive attitude made this summer in the lab a joy, and we’re excited to keep working with him!
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This summer, Amaria Clark joined the CARE Lab through the Summer Research Opportunities Program (SROP) at the University of Notre Dame, which gives students opportunities to gain mentored research experience.
During her time with the lab, Amaria coducted virtual audits of neighborhood disorder and completed her own research project examining the moderating role of quality sibling relationships between neighborhood deprivation and externalizing behaviors in youth. Amaria presented her poster "Quality Sibling Relationships: A Protective Factor for Externalizing Behaviors in Children Exposed to Neighborhood Deprivation" at the Summer Research Poster Session.
Amaria will be returning to Howard University this fall to start her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology. We are excited to see what she accomplishes and wish her the best!
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To celebrate the end of a busy semester and all of our students' hard work, members of the CARE lab got together for a Pizza Painting Party! Held outside on a beautiful day, the event gave everyone a chance to unwind with good food, creativity, and great company.
Check out the photo to see everyone's beautiful art!
]]>To learn more, check out the full article here!
]]>Last semester, Dr. Shewark and members of the CARE lab spent time recruiting a team of undergraduate research assistants, writing many protocols, and setting up the lab space. This semester, the CARE Lab plans to start our virtual neighborhood audits and prepare to start collecting data in the fall.
We are excited about the future of the CARE Lab and look forward to the work ahead!
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Dr. Shewark and the CARE lab will examine data from the Study of Adolescent to Adult Neurodevelopment (SAND) to assess the neighborhood features of 350 families when the child was ages 9, 15, and 22. We will conduct virtual neighborhood audits using Google Street View to examine signs of physical disorder, such as lot maintenance and vacancies. Additionally, public neighborhood data will be utilized to gather information about additional features within the neighborhood, including bluespace (e.g., lakes), greenspace (e.g., parks), and commercial businesses.
This project has two key goals. First, Dr. Shewark aims to identify protective structural features within neighborhoods, such as parks, libraries, and community centers that may promote youth resilience development. The second is to investigate how these neighborhood features may support resilient parenting practices which, in turn, promote youth resilience.
Through this project, Dr. Shewark hopes to identify protective physical features within the environment that can be targeted to promote resilience and help youth thrive.
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The new assistant professors — Ryan Carpenter, Haya Fatimah, Kaylin Hill, Matthew Robison, Elizabeth Shewark and Ivan Vargas — will further research in their subfields of cognitive, behavioral, clinical and developmental psychology. Their scholarly work will aim to address the psychological causes and effects of various issues such as trauma, self-harm, sleep disorders and substance use disorder.
“The addition of six new faculty members to a single department in one year is a rare and transformative event,” said James Brockmole, professor of psychology and chair of the department. “By recruiting these outstanding young scholars to Notre Dame, we have significantly expanded the questions we can ask about a wide range of mental phenomena, the methods that we can use to derive answers to those questions, and the educational opportunities that we can offer to our undergraduate and graduate students.”
Four of the new faculty are clinical psychologists and will conduct research at the new Veldman Family Psychology Clinic, which broke ground at 501 N. Hill St. in South Bend’s East Bank neighborhood on Sept. 20 and is expected to be completed in 2026. The 36,000-square-foot facility is the first piece of Notre Dame’s $68 million commitment to improving mental health on campus, in the South Bend community and across the nation.
Once at full capacity, the clinic will serve more than 1,500 people in the South Bend community annually through mental health assessment, intervention and prevention services, and will be home to faculty and graduate students developing scalable, evidence-based solutions that address childhood trauma, substance use and other mental health concerns.
In his research, clinical psychologist Ryan Carpenter focuses on understanding substance use in the everyday lives of everyday people.
To examine alcohol and opioid use, Carpenter uses technologies such as smartphones and portable breathalyzers to understand what occurs in people’s lives that ultimately triggers their decision to imbibe in addictive substances. In his lab, he is also interested in testing if mobile health interventions, such as smartphone apps, can be helpful to people trying to address their substance use.
“To improve treatment options, there is a critical need to better understand why some people can use substances largely without issue, while others develop significant problems,” he said.
Carpenter, who was a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University and most recently was an assistant professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, currently has two projects funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism to develop and tailor behavioral interventions to address the co-use of alcohol and opioids in young adults and to help people who are drinking alcohol while in treatment for opioid use.
At Notre Dame, Carpenter said, he’s looking forward to collaborating with his colleagues and to making lasting relationships with South Bend community partners. He said the development of the Veldman Family Psychology Clinic will also provide critical infrastructure for both conducting substance use research and providing treatment services in the community.
“A major draw of Notre Dame for me is the opportunity to be around so many people studying so many important and interesting research questions,” he said. “It’s energizing and I’m looking forward to building new collaborations here across the department, college and University, as well as the broader Michiana community.”
Clinical psychologist Haya Fatimah studies complex dynamics in psychopathology, especially those with borderline personality and comorbid disorders.
Fatimah received her doctorate from the University of South Florida and completed a postdoctoral clinical internship at McLean Hospital with Harvard Medical School. She is particularly interested in predicting factors and behaviors that are aligned with borderline personality disorder such as suicide, non-suicidal injury and substance use. She is currently studying the complex dynamics underlying nonsuicidal self-injury in youth, with the goal of identifying critical windows of risk to inform prevention and treatment efforts.
Fatimah’s goal at Notre Dame in this research is to develop personalized treatment with a dynamic systems approach to understand personality pathology and focus on risk factors and processes at the level of a single individual.
“I am especially interested in how personality pathology emerges, and what we can do about it,” she said.
Kaylin Hill finds that emotional experiences are at the heart of what is important to us.
Originally from the South Bend area, Hill received her doctorate in clinical psychology from Purdue University. She studied psychophysiological assessment in particular, using electroencephalogram as an assessment tool in understanding emotions, as well as other neural processes such as reward and error-monitoring.
“I continued to pursue these questions related to understanding emotions broadly and depression more specifically, and as I began to understand more of what these processes look like in adults, I began to ask more questions about how they developed,” she said.
She continued her analysis during a postdoctoral appointment in developmental psychopathology at Vanderbilt University. Hill’s current research focuses on how to better characterize depression symptoms, refine psychophysiological assessment for individuals, and identify both individual and contextual risk processes with a focus toward intervention.
“As a clinical psychologist, the ultimate aim of my work is to reduce the tremendous burden of depression on individuals and families,” she said.
As part of that, Hill is creating the Psychophysiology of Affect Across the Lifespan (PAL) Lab at Notre Dame, where the aim will be to examine emotion and social processes related to depression and the risk of depression in individuals and families.
“I am excited to work alongside my esteemed colleagues, to teach and mentor such wonderful students, and especially to contribute to the growing neuroscience area and to work with the community through the William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families,” Hill said. “Additionally, working on campus means that I get to revisit nostalgic experiences from when I was kid, and I am thrilled to offer the same experiences to my children alongside their grandparents.”
As a cognitive psychologist, Matthew Robison aims to answer questions regarding attentiveness — how are some people able to control and sustain their attention while others struggle? Why do people feel alert in some moments but not in others? How do lifestyle factors like sleep, mood and exercise affect cognitive function?
“Attention seems to be one of the core cognitive skills that leads us to success in a variety of mental endeavors,” Robison said. “However, we also know that controlling and sustaining attention is difficult, particularly for some people, and doing so for a long period of time can produce mental strain and fatigue.”
Through his research, Robison addresses three key points — identifying psychological factors that might cause a person to be inattentive and distracted, recognizing when keeping attention causes stress and fatigue, and answering if a person can improve their attention through training exercises.
Robison received his doctorate from the University of Oregon and was a postdoctoral scholar at Arizona State University and an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. A Notre Dame alumnus, he said his return as a faculty member was once a distant dream that has now come true.
“I am excited to collaborate with the wonderful faculty we have in the department and all across campus,” he said. “I’m eager to mentor graduate students to be excellent psychological scientists in this vibrant and rigorous academic environment, to teach and train our undergraduate students in psychological science, and to actively participate in the on-campus and greater South Bend community both through my research and in many other ways.”
As an undergraduate, Elizabeth Shewark found herself becoming increasingly interested in the motivations behind people’s behavior, taking courses in developmental psychology that covered everything from the prenatal period to aging and death.
“I was hooked,” she said. “Change is life. How lucky are we that we get to change over time — that we get to explore all these different versions of ourselves over the course of our lifespan?”
Now, as a developmental psychologist at Notre Dame, Shewark has set a research goal to examine children’s resilience development within their social systems such as families, schools and neighborhoods. She examines this by applying cutting-edge research and statistical methods to illuminate the biological and environmental impacts on child development.
She has further applied this research interest, with support from a National Institutes of Health Pathway to Independence Award, toward children who face trauma and adversity through poverty and exposure to community violence.
Shewark received her doctorate from Penn State University and was inspired to come to Notre Dame after visiting with psychology faculty member Laura Miller-Graff and the psychology department, as well as attending the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society’s Health Equity Data Forum.
“I kept thinking how amazing it would be to work here, with these brilliant individuals and at a university that asks, ‘How can we help?’” she said. “I am incredibly honored to have joined such a thoughtful, innovative and service-oriented community of scholars where I feel like I can have an impact. I look forward to building connections both within the University and in the surrounding communities to advance healthy development for all.”
Sleep can occupy a third of one’s life, yet little is known about it. Ivan Vargas’ research aims to better understand insomnia and its effects on overall health.
“One idea I hope people can take away from the work that I do is that insomnia is not only bad for your sleep, it’s also bad for your health,” he said. “Insomnia affects a lot of people every day, and we often overlook the negative consequences it can have on our overall mental and physical health.”
Vargas received his doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program and the Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. He was most recently an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas.
His work includes a number of projects that evaluate behavioral interventions for sleep such as cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. His research is currently supported by a National Institutes of Health career development award funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
Vargas also received his bachelor’s degree from Notre Dame and said he’s excited to see the University’s increased commitment to identifying solutions to address the mental health crisis.
“I look forward to the opportunities that this will provide to our department,” he said. “My hope is that in my time here at Notre Dame, we can expand the knowledge and resources that are available for people struggling with insomnia and related sleep problems.”
Originally published by at al.nd.edu on Sept. 25.
Contact: Tracy DeStazio, associate director of media relations, 574-631-9958 or tdestazi@nd.edu
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