FEND News
2023 - Congratulation to graduate student Melanie Grad-Freilich for being awarded an NIH-funded Behavioral Brain Research Training Program (B2) Fellowship from the Pitt/CMU Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition!
2023 - Congratulations to graduating student Stefanie Sequeira on starting a tenure track Assistant Professor Position in the Clinical Program at University of Virginia!
2023 - Congratulations to graduate student Kirsten McKone! She was awarded seed research funding from the Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation at Pitt for novel research on
2023 - Congratulations to grad student Melanie Grad-Freilich for winning an Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Organization Travel Grant Award and a Huey Research Award from the department to expand minority recruitment in the Teen SCREEN Study!
2023 - Congratulations to former FEND undergrad Ken Goodrich on being selected as a Hot Metal Bridge Fellow for the 2023-2024 academic year!
2023 – Affiliated faculty member Lauren Blysma was promoted to Associate Professor and named a Fellow of the Society for Psychophysiological Research!
2022 - Congratulations to grad student Zelal Kilic for winning a $1000 Lazovik Award grant from the Psychology Department! She will use the funds to collect and analyze photographic data from Instagram as an add-on to the Teen Screen Study!
2023 - Congratulations to graduate student Kirsten McKone! She was awarded an E.B. Huey Research Grant to validate a measure of climate anxiety in a sample of adolescents.
2023 - Congrats to our undergraduate research assistant Anvi Joshi, who was awarded a summer research fellowship from the Mascaro Center for
2023 - Congratulations to graduate student Quyen Do for being selected as the Developmental Program recipient for the 2023 Jeremy Landen Johnson Memorial Award for her Masters thesis research!
2023 - Congratulations to affiliated faculty member Mary Woody! She was awarded a Klingenstein Third Generation Foundation (KTGF) Depression Fellowship.
2022 - Mary Woody was awarded a University of Pittsburgh Innovation Challenge (PInCh) Award. Congrats, Mary!
2023 - Congratulation to graduate student Melanie Grad-Freilich for being awarded an NIH-funded Behavioral Brain Research Training Program (B2) Fellowship from the Pitt/CMU Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition!
2023 - Check out this podcast on Drs. Silk and James' paper showing a beneficial side to texting and videochat for teen connectedness & mental health during COVID.
2022- Congratulations to graduate student Stefanie Sequeira for being named one of 3 national winners of the Society for the Science of Clinical Psychology Dissertation Grant Award.
2022- Congratulations to lab director, Dr. Jennifer Silk, and her colleague Dr. Cecile Ladouceur, for receiving an R01 grant from the NIMH: “Neural sensitivity to social evaluation and daily online and in-person social experience with peers: Predicting fluctuations in suicidality, self-harm, and depressive symptoms in adolescent girls”. This study examines how socially threatening and rewarding peer interactions—experienced online or in-person—contribute to real-time fluctuations in suicidality, self-harm, and depressive symptoms, independently and in interaction with neural
2022- Congratulations to lab director, Dr. Jennifer Silk, and her colleague Dr. Erika Forbes, for receiving an R01 grant from the NIMH: “Social-Affective Vulnerability to Suicidality among LGBTQ Young Adults: Proximal and Distal Factors.” This project uses ecological momentary assessment, neuroimaging, and machine learning to examine how real-time social interactions, and associated neural responses, predict increases in suicidal thoughts and behaviors among LGBT late adolescents and young adults.
2022- Congratulations to Gaduate Student Quyen Do for receiving the 2022 Merle Moskowitz Graduate Student Teaching Award!
2022- Congratulations to Mary Woody, PhD, for receiving the Brain & Behavior Foundation NARSAD Young Investigator Grant!
2021 - Congratulations to former GIRLS: Brain Research Coordinator, Kayley Morrow for accepting an offer at the University of Georgia in the Clinical Psychology Ph.D. Program!
2022 - Congratulations to former lab manager, Sarah Wang, for accepting an offer at the University of Maryland in the Clinical Psychology Ph.D. Program.
2022 - Congratulations to former Teen SCREEN Research Coordinator, Celine Lu, for accepting an offer at the University of Washington in the Clinical Psychology Ph.D. Program.
2022 - Congratulations to graduate student, Kirsten McKone for receiving the Jeremy Johnson Award!
July 2022- See this month's article from the APA monitor discussing the neuroscience of the adolescent brain, which includes some mention of the work in our lab! Full Article
2022- Congratulations to graduate student Stefanie Sequeira for matching at Brown University’s Internship Program and winning the 2022 Bassell Student Award, given by the Psychology department to an outstanding student heading off to internship.
2022- Congratulations to graduate student Quyen Do for winning an Outstanding Student Panel Award at the 2022 Pitt Grad Expo!
2021- Congratulations to Mary Woody, PhD, for receiving a Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science!
2021 - Congratulations to FEND Lab's former affiliated post-doctoral scholar for becoming an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Rutgers University! Check out her website here: thehamiltonlab.org
2020 - Congratulations to graduate student Rosalind Butterfield for receiving an internship placement at Western Psychiatric Hospital!
2020 - Congratulations to graduate student Kirsten McKone for receiving the Merle Moskowitz Teaching Award for graduate student teaching excellence!
2020 - Congratulations to research coordinator, Kayley Morrow, for her new role as the FEND Lab Director of Equity and Inclusion. This new position is part of the FEND Lab's effort to create a more inclusive environment in research and academia.
2020 - Congratulations to research coordinators, Kayley Morrow, Sarah Wang, and Celine Lu, and graduate student Emily Hutchinson for having posters accepted at the 54th Annual ABCT Conference!
2020 - Congratulations to former graduate student, Dana Rosen, for her new post-doctoral fellowship position at Alpert Brown Medical School! Here, she does a mixture of clinical and research work. Specifically, she is working in the Adult Partial Hospitalization Program where they treat adults with a range of presenting mental health concerns using an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy approach.
2020 - Congratulations to FEND Lab Affiliated Faculty Dr. Mary Woody and Dr. Caroline Oppenheimer for being selected for the Early Career Investigator Travel Award Fellowship at the Society of Biological Psychiatry!
2020 - Congratulations to FEND Lab Affiliated Faculty Dr. Mary Woody for Receiving the Career Development Leadership Program Award at the Anxiety and Depression Association of America!
2020 - Congratulations to Dr. Mary Woody for passing all licensure exams and becoming a licensed psychologist!
2020 - Congratulations to graduate students, Stefanie Sequeira, Quyen Do, Emily Hutchinson, and Kirsten McKone, as well a research coordinators, Sarah Wang, Kayley Morrow, and Celine Lu for having posters and talks accepted at the 18th Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research on Adolescence (SRA) in San Diego, California!
2020 - Congratulations to graduate students Quyen Do and Emily Hutchinson for receiving the E.B. Huey Award! This award is going towards a daily diary assessment study assessing the socioemotional impacts of COVID-19 on our current GIRLS: Brain sample.
2020 - Congratulations to FEND Lab's undergraduate research assistants, Raya Pezillo, Jessica Mak and Jessica Morrell, for graduating!
2019-Congratulations to one of FEND Lab's former undergraduate students, Maria Evankovich who will be starting at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in the fall!
2019-Congratulations to FEND Lab's affiliated faculty, Dr. Caroline Oppenheimer for receiving the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention Young Investigator Award to look at how acute physical pain modulates neural processing of social rejection in young adults engaging in nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI)!
2019-The FEND Lab has received the Pitt Seed Grant to fund the SmartCAT in the Community Project! Pitt Seed Projects are well-defined actions that will play an instrumental role in transforming the University of Pittsburgh that align with the Plan for Pitt aims. Read more here.
2019-The FEND Lab has received a grant from the Social Science Research Initiative for the SmartCAT in the Community Project. The initiative is focused on interdisciplinary approaches within the social sciences.
2019-The FEND Lab has received a one year supplemental grant to add questions about suicidality and self-harm to the GIRLS: Brain ecological momentary assessment protocol!
2019-Congratulations to affiliated faculty, Dr. Caroline Oppenheimer and FEND Lab PI Dr. Silk, for being one of three winners in the poster competition in the Pitt Innovation Challenge! The project, TeenBrainOnline, is a novel neuroimaging task to measure teen brain response to social media. This tool will address a need to study the impact of social media on rising teen depression and suicide rates. Read more here.
2019-Congratulations to FEND Lab's affiliated faculty, Dr. Lauren Bylsma for being awarded the 2019 Early Career Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychophysiological Research from the Society for Psychophysiological Research! She presented an award address at SPR's annual meeting in DC in September and an award paper will be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Psychophysiology.
2019-Congratulations to FEND Lab's affiliated faculty Dr. Lauren Bylsma for being a Co-Investigator on a recently funded grant from NIMH (PI Kristin Naragon-Gainey) investigating emotion regulation capacity and tendency components and contextual influences in the laboratory and daily life (including ambulatory psychophysiology) in a large sample of adults oversampled for distress disorders!
2019-Congratulations to graduate student Dana Rosen for going on her Pre-Doctorsal Clinical Psychology Internship at the VA Central Western Massachusetts Healthcare System!
2019 - SmartCAT was recently featured in a PittWire article. Dr. Silk and Dr. Parmanto are featured in this article and discuss the future directions of implementing the SmartCAT app in the real world. Read more here.
2019-Congratulations to FEND Lab's former post-doctoral fellow and current affiliated faculty, Dr. Mary Woody for receiving a K23 Career Development Award from NIMH and being appointed as an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry in the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in April 2019!
2019-Congratulations to graduate students Stefanie Sequeira, Rosalind Elliott, Dana Rosen, and Kirsten McKone for receiving the 2019 Bassell Student Publication Award! This award is given annually by the Clinical Psychology Program for the best first author publication in the previous academic year.
2018-Congratulations to graduate student Kirsten McKone for receiving the 1028 A. David Lazovik Grant from the psychology department!
2018-Congratulations to graduate student, Dana Rosen for receiving the Bassell Clinical Excellence Award!
2018-Congratulations to graduate student Dana Rosen for receiving the Ruth L. Meyers Undergraduate Mentoring Excellence Award! This award is granted to a graduate student who has distinguished him or herself as an outstanding mentor of undergraduate students in the lab or the classroom.
2018-Congratulations to FEND Lab Director, Dr. Jennifer Silk, for being selected as a Fellow in the Association for Psychological Science! This award is granted to those who have made sustained outstanding contributions to the field of psychological science. Read more about this story in the Pittwire.
2018-Congratulations to FEND graduate student, Rosalind Elliott, who won the student poster award at the 2018 National Conference in Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology in Kansas City. Rosalind was the first author of her poster, entitled Adolescent Girls Physiological Reactivity is Associated with Real-World Peer Feedback: Validation of a Novel Peer Expressed Emotion Task.
2017-Lauren Bylsma is awarded a Brain and Behavior Research Foundation NARSAD Young Investigator Grant. Her project is entitled Gut Microbiome Influences on Reward and Stress Systems in Depressed, High Risk, and Healthy Adolescents. The project is scheduled to begin in January of 2018 and continue for 2 years.