Meet The PREP Team

Olivia Haller (she/they) is originally from Minneapolis and obtained her Bachelor of Arts in Behavioral Neuroscience and Classical Studies from Colgate University in 2017. During her undergraduate career, Olivia worked on several projects studying traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder at the University of Minnesota and Baylor College of Medicine. Upon completion of her undergraduate degree, she joined the Boston University Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center, where she worked as the Recruitment and Retention Coordinator for the DIAGNOSE CTE Research Project. Her research interests include utilizing multimodal neuroimaging techniques to investigate cognitive, behavioral, and mood outcomes in a variety of research populations.

Simone Sanders (she/her) is a third-year Ph.D. student in Georgia State University’s Clinical Psychology program, and she works in the Health Equity, Agency, Racism, and Trauma (HEART) Lab here at GSU. She received her B.A. in Clinical Psychology from Tufts University and worked as a coordinator for early intervention initiatives/studies through the Psychosis Research Program in Boston, MA. She’s broadly interested in exploring how multiple levels of oppression interact to influence a number of health outcomes for Black Americans. She’s interested in understanding how racism has shaped, and potentially undergirds symptom presentations / transdiagnostic experiences (e.g., psychosis) that are often overpathologized among Black-American populations.

Caitlin Schneider is a third-year doctoral student in the Clinical Psychology program. She works with Dr. Lindsey Cohen in the Child Health and Medical Pain (CHAMP) lab. She is interested in risk and resilience in children and adolescents in the context of chronic illnesses.

Anne Werkheiser (she/her) is a 3rd-year graduate student in the clinical psychology PhD program at GSU. Anne earned bachelor’s degrees in psychology and Spanish from Goucher College. After graduation, she worked as a clinical research assistant at the University of Maryland, Baltimore studying innovative treatments for psychosis spectrum disorders. Her research interests include anxiety and emotion regulation, and she is currently collecting data for her thesis studying worry as an emotion regulation strategy. Anne has worked clinically with individual adult therapy clients with anxiety and mood disorders and is currently completing a practicum at Grady Behavioral Health providing CBT for psychosis to clients with psychosis spectrum disorders and other forms of severe and persistent mental illness. Anne also serves as Advocacy Liaison for the GSU Clinic Diversity Committee and she engages outside of graduate school in abolitionist community organizing with racial justice organizations in Baltimore and Atlanta.

Anna Peddle is a doctoral student in Georgia State University’s Clinical Psychology program. She is in Dr. Cynthia Stappenbeck’s Alcohol and Interpersonal Violence lab, which researches technology-based interventions for substance-abusing populations and victims of domestic and sexual violence. Her additional research interests include examining mediating factors in the relationship between sexual victimization and STI/HIV risk.

Holly Aleksonis, M.A. is a doctoral student in the Clinical Neuropsychology Program. She works with Dr. Tricia King in the Developmental Neuropsychology Across the Lifespan Lab (DNP-ATL) where she studies long-term neurocognitive and adaptive outcomes of survivors of childhood brain tumors. She hopes to pursue a career as a pediatric clinical neuropsychologist.

Asha Jimenez is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the clinical-community program. She is currently serving as one of the lecture coordinators for PREP. Her research focuses on the impact of racial discrimination on Black emerging adults and how protective factors, including ethnic-racial socialization and coping, protect outcomes of psychological adjustment. She received her B.A. in Psychology from Loyola Marymount University and previously worked on mental health program development and evaluation with historically underserved communities. 

Jordan Pincus is a 2nd-year graduate student in the Clinical Neuropsychology program at GSU. Before coming to GSU, Jordan studied Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology at Emory University. As an undergraduate research assistant in the Dilks Lab, she studied the development of scene-processing abilities and cortical regions. Then, Jordan worked as a postbaccalaureate research assistant at the Marcus Autism Center, using eye-tracking and neuroimaging to investigate the neurobiological processes underlying neurodevelopmental disorders (i.e. autism spectrum disorder and 3q29 deletion syndrome). Broadly, Jordan’s research interests focus on using neuroimaging and neuropsychological to investigate how the brain, cognition, and behavior change throughout development and following a neurodevelopmental disruption. In her free time, Jordan enjoys traveling, cooking, gardening, practicing yoga, and playing lots of board games! 

Madeline Rech is a second-year clinical psychology graduate student at Georgia State, working in Dr. Page Anderson’s Anxiety Research and Treatment Lab. Her primary research interests involve understanding the thought processes involved in anxiety disorders, and how technology can be used to assess and treat social anxiety disorder specifically. Outside of academia, Madeline has worked at a mental health hotline and served at Big Brothers Big Sisters through an AmeriCorps apprenticeship program, Public Allies, centered around social justice.

Dr. Tone is a clinical psychologist who currently acts as the department’s Director of Clinical Training. She has a special interest in the ways in which emotional states, such as anxiety or depression, affect social behavior in both adults and children. Her research projects in the lab examine the ways in which anxious people behave in social situations and the cognitive, emotional, and neural processes that contribute to both their adaptive and their maladaptive interactions. She is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and has served on study sections for the National Institutes of Health. In 2018, GSU’s College of Arts and Sciences recognized her with its Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award, and in 2020, she received GSU’s Alumni Distinguished Professor Award.

Dr. Suzann Lawry is a 1996 graduate of the Clinical Psychology Program at GSU and returned to teach and supervise therapy services in the GSU Psychology Clinic which is a low-cost training clinic. She is particularly interested in the intersection of the Impostor Phenomenon, Burnout, and Social Justice. In addition to her position at GSU, she maintains a local private practice.

Gabriel Kuperminc, Ph.D. is Professor of Psychology and Public Health at Georgia State University where he serves as director of the doctoral program in community psychology and chairs the university’s interdisciplinary Resilient Youth (ResY) initiative, which emphasizes a resilience perspective to study and develop interventions to reduce health disparities among urban youth. He consults on youth development and prevention of violence and substance abuse with various organizations including MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership, the Georgia Family Connection Partnership, Boys and Girls Clubs of America, The National Latin@ Network for Healthy Families and Communities, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.