Graduate Students
Julia Vernon, M.A.
Doctoral Student
Julia earned her BA in Psychology and International Development Studies at McGill University in 2013. After graduation, she worked at the HIV Prevention Lab in the Department of Psychology at Ryerson University, where she coordinated multiple research studies, including clinical trials evaluating individual and group-based motivational interviewing and cognitive behavioural therapy treatment protocols. Julia joined the Adolescent Health Lab in September 2018 as an MA student in the Clinical Psychology program. Her thesis explored the ways in which parent emotion regulation and mindful parenting relate to youth internalizing and externalizing symptoms directly and indirectly through youth-parent attachment security.
Julia’s current research is funded by a Doctoral Research Award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Her dissertation investigates how changes in parent emotion regulation and mindful parenting over the course of Connect relate to changes in youth-parent attachment security and mental health symptoms. She is also conducting a systematic review of interventions that target parent emotion regulation.
Sherene Balanji, B.A. (Hons)
Master’s Student
Sherene earned her BA in Psychology at Simon Fraser University in 2020 and began her MA in Clinical Child Psychology in 2021. She has longstanding interest in adolescent mental health which began as a focused interest on disordered eating but has since expanded to reflect comorbidity and the importance of transdiagnostic protective factors like secure attachment and emotion regulation. Sherene’s MA thesis will be employing a network analysis to model the relationship between symptoms of anxiety, depression, attachment, and emotion regulation to better understand how comorbidity emerges in teens.
Laura Daari, B.A. (Hons)
Master’s Student
Laura Daari is a graduate student in the Clinical Psychology (Child Track) program at Simon Fraser University, and a researcher in the Adolescent Health Lab. She completed her Bachelor of Arts (Honors) in Psychology at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University). Before joining the Adolescent Health Lab in 2022, Laura gained valuable experience in research and clinical practise while working as a Research Lab Coordinator, Psychology Clinical Service Coordinator, and Senior Research Assistant at different universities and research institutes across Canada and Israel. Throughout these positions Laura’s passion for research and clinical work with parents, children and adolescents grew. She is particularly fascinated in the parent-child relationship during the adolescent period, and how teens and their parents navigate this critical period of change. Her research interests include examining youth who experience risk, such as those who have been removed from their homes and placed in foster and kinship care, and the promotion of positive and strong relationships between youth and their caregivers which can support adolescent development.
Laura’s master’s thesis will examine how foster/kinship caregiver emotion regulation and caregiver strain both change and relate to one another over the course of Connect for Kinship & Foster Parents (CKFP), an attachment-focused intervention adopted from the evidence-based program Connect. She will also examine how potential changes in foster/kinship caregiver emotion regulation and caregiver strain may relate to changes in youth mental health functioning and attachment security. Laura hopes this study can help acquire knowledge of the unique needs of severely at-risk youth and inform future interventions which address these needs.
Jesse Scott, B.A. (Hons)
Master’s Student
Jesse joined the Adolescent Health Lab and Clinical Psychology program at Simon Fraser University in September 2023. She earned her BA from the University of Windsor, where she served as a project manager and research assistant across multiple labs and with community partners at a hospital, youth diversion program, and children’s centre. Her interests are largely informed by her experiences working alongside children, adolescents, and their families in clinical settings. She is interested in early adversity, attachment insecurity, emotional and social information processing, the co-occurrence of externalizing and internalizing symptoms, resilience, and mechanisms of therapeutic change. Jesse is passionate about trauma- and attachment-informed models and is eager to analyze Connect program data for her MA thesis. She may be contacted at scott_jesse@sfu.ca.
Grad Student Alumni
Carlos Sierra, Ph.D.
Doctoral Student
DISSERTATION: Maternal and paternal depressive symptoms and parent-child attachment: Examination of change after participation in an attachment-based program
Rajan Hayre, M.A.
Graduate Student
THESIS: School Connectedness & Attachment: Predicted and Moderated Relationships with Substance Use, Depression, and Suicidality Among Teens At-Risk
Antonia Dangaltcheva, Ph.D.
Doctoral Student
DISSERTATION: Development of an Attachment Based Program for Parents of Teens with Gender Dysphoria
Lin Bao, Ph.D.
Doctoral Student
DISSERTATION: eConnect: Interactive Online Delivery of an Attachment-Based Group Intervention