Graduate Students
R. Pinar Karan: Lab Manager and Ph.D. Student
Pinar is a third-year doctoral student in HDQM program at the University of Maryland, College Park. She received her B.A. in Psychology from Boğaziçi University in 2020. She continued her graduate education at Boğaziçi University under the supervision of Prof. Feyza Çorapçı in 2020. She has trained in art psychotherapy at Istanbul University, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Mental Health and Diseases, Social Psychiatry Service since 2022. Her research interest includes father-child dyad relationships and the role of fathering in children’s socioemotional development. She is also interested in using art as a way of enriching communication in the family environment.
Miaofan Chen: Ph.D. Student
Miaofan Chen is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology at the University of Maryland. She holds a B.A. in Psychology and Cognitive Science from Rutgers University. Her research explores how children’s cognitive development and early learning environments shape individual differences in numerical representation. By integrating behavioral experiments, computational modeling, and neuroimaging data, she seeks to uncover the origins of number knowledge, explain disparities in number learning, and design interventions that promote equity in early math education and everyday cognition.
Jialing Wu: Ph.D. student
Jialing Wu is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology at the University of Maryland. She earned her B.S. in Psychology from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. Her research focuses on the similarities and differences between maternal and paternal influences on children’s socioemotional and cognitive development, with a particular interest in how these dynamics vary across cultural and socioeconomic contexts.