​Maya Rossignac-Milon is a fifth year graduate student working with Prof. Niall Bolger. She received her BA in Psychology from McGill University in 2012, where she completed undergraduate theses with Profs John Lydon and Mark Baldwin. She subsequently worked as Lab Coordinator until 2013 for Prof. Donald Taylor. Her research explores the role of shared reality – experiencing the world in the same way – in close relationship initiation and maintenance. Specifically, her work examines how shared reality can contribute to the feeling of ‘clicking’ between strangers, and to the feeling of having merged minds in long-term relationships. She hopes to use shared reality theory to inform our understanding of the way that our close relationships influence, and are influenced by, the social construction of “truth”. Personal website: http://blogs.cuit.columbia.edu/mayarossignacmilon/
​Abdiel Flores is a fourth year doctoral student at Columbia University working with Dr. Niall Bolger. Abdiel graduated in 2012 with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Prior to coming to Columbia, Abdiel spent two years as a Project Director in the Emotion, Health, and Psychophysiology Lab at UCSF. His research interests lie in the intersection of social stigma and health. He is particularly interested in using dyadic psychophysiological and intensive longitudinal methods to understand the psychological and biological mechanisms linking discrimination and health.
Katherine Zee received her B.A. in Psychology from Columbia University in 2012. She was then a research assistant in Dr. Madoka Kumashiro’s lab at Goldsmiths, University of London, and also assisted on projects led by Dr. Xi Zou of London Business School and Dr. Eric Levy of the University of Cambridge. In 2014, she returned to Columbia as a PhD Student under the mentorship of Dr. Niall Bolger and Dr. Tory Higgins. Her research examines the ingredients of beneficial social support and the implications of receiving such support. She is especially interested in the social regulatory role of social support—for example, how receiving social support can help people to manage their psychological and physiological stress or pursue important goals—and in the ways in which social support influences intrapersonal as well as interpersonal wellbeing. Personal website: https://kzee.github.io
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**Please note that as of March 2020, Katherine will not be bringing on new research assistants for the summer or academic year.
Megan Goldring earned a BA in Psychology from the University of Southern California in 2014. She then worked as a research fellow at the National Institutes of Health, where she studied how health information and moral emotions influence parent feeding behavior. Megan joined the Columbia Couples lab in 2017. She is broadly interested in the intersection between social and health psychology, and is currently working on research that further explores eating and feeding behaviors in the parent-child dyad. Megan is particularly interested in using intensive longitudinal methods and psychophysiological approaches to elucidate the psychological processes that influence health within family and community systems.
Ana DiGiovanni graduated from New York University in 2018, with a BA in Psychology. Before
coming to Columbia, she worked as a researcher and health coach at the Veterans Affairs Hospital, as part of a team studying diabetic-related health outcomes. Under Dr. Niall Bolger, Ana studies how social support influences motivational and regulatory processes, specifically in the health domain. She explores how dyadic interactions can either promote or prohibit the adoption and maintenance of healthy/unhealthy behaviors, and how this influences more long-term health outcomes. Ana seeks to explore these questions by studying a variety of close relationships, and how these processes play out over time.