Student Research Conference Program [PDF] and Abstracts

March 1-5, 2021

Poster Abstracts

Monday, March 1, 2021

Roundtable Abstract
Roundtable and Faculty Discussion Links

Tuesday, March 2, 2021

Roundtable Abstracts
Roundtable and Faculty Discussion Links

Wednesday, March 3, 2021

Oral Presentation Abstracts
Oral Presentation Discussion Links

Thursday, March 4, 2021

Oral Presentation Abstracts
Oral Presentation Discussion Links

Student Research Conference 2021 Discussion Panel  - Agenda (Printable)

11:00 am-1:00 pm Tuesday, March 2, 2021

The Journey to Graduate School: Discuss their graduate program, provide 1-3 tips for applicants and incoming students. Q & A sessions will follow.

C. (Kate) Esposito, PhD
Professor & Chair, Special Education, College of Education

Dr. Esposito is the Chair of and professor in the Special Education Program at California State University, Dominguez Hills. Dr. Esposito conducts and publishes research in the areas of teacher preparation and inclusive practices. She received her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees from Loyola Marymount University and her Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Southern California. She holds Multiple Subject and Mild/Moderate Teaching Credentials. She has also served on the editorial and executive boards of scholarly journals and professional organizations.

Adriean Mancillas, PsyD
Professor of Counseling
Program Coordinator, School and College Counseling

Dr. Mancillas is a Professor in and Program Coordinator of the School and College Counseling Program in the Division of Graduate Education, College of Education. She also currently serves at Chair of Graduate Council, a collective of the graduate degree programs on our campus. She has taught at CSUDH for 19 years and is also a clinical psychologist and former school counselor.

Terry Peralta-Catipon, PhD, OTR/L

Associate Professor, Chair and Program Director, Department of Occupational Therapy
College of Health, Human Services and Nursing

Dr. Peralta-Catipon is the Chair of the Occupational Therapy Department at California State University Dominguez Hills since 2010. She began as adjunct faculty in 2002 then became a tenure-track faculty in 2004. She earned her Doctor of Philosophy degree in Occupational Science and a Master of Arts in Occupational Therapy from the University of Southern California and a Bachelor of Science degree in Zoology from the University of the Philippines. As an occupational therapy practitioner for 22 years, her work was mainly in adult rehabilitation and community-based programs for older adults and mental health. Her research interests are in ethnographic studies, especially in the areas of migrant adaptation, community wellness, and promotion of cultural occupations. She married in 2003 and is a mother of two daughters. Her hobbies are playing golf, cooking, and traveling.

Annemarie Perez, PhD
Assistant Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies
College of Arts and Humanities

Dr. Annemarie Perez is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies. She is a native of Los Angeles and passionately interested in the literature and culture of Southern California, detective fiction, and Harry Potter. Her academic interests include digital humanities and digital pedagogy work and its intersections and divisions with ethnic and cultural studies. Her specialty is Latina/o literature, with a focus on Chicana feminist writer-editors from 1965-to the present. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation and Irvine Foundation. She is currently writing a book on Chicana feminist editorship. This single authored book addresses questions about late twentieth century Chicana authorship and editorship, using textual readings and interviews to explore the evolution of editorship and the development of textual communities within and around the development of Chicana feminist praxis.

Silvia J. Santos, PhD
Professor, Department of Psychology
Co-Coordinator, Master of Arts in Psychology Program

Dr. Santos is a Professor of Psychology and the Co-Coordinator of the Psychology
Master of Arts program at California State University, Dominguez Hills. She earned her Doctor of Philosophy degree in Social and Personality Psychology from the University of California, Riverside. Her research interests and publications have centered on ethnic minority and Latino immigrant mental health and the role of faculty mentoring and ethnic identity processes on the academic and college adjustment of students. More recently Dr. Santos’ focus of research has shifted to ethnic health disparities and she is the Principal Investigator on a NIH funded pilot grant examining diabetes illness beliefs and health-related attitudes and practices of Latinx emerging adults who are at high risk for future diabetes onset. Dr. Santos is an invited member of the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi which recognizes faculty who have achieved scholarly distinction and is the recipient of the Dean’s Award for Outstanding Teaching and Service to Students and the Outstanding Professor Award: Exemplary Service to Students with Disabilities.

Betty Vu, PhD
Assistant Dean, Graduate and Professional Programs
College of Business Administration and Public Policy

Dr. Betty Vu has been in graduate admission for more than twenty years. Her professional experience includes working for the University of Southern California (USC), Loyola Marymount University, Whittier College, and The Chicago School of Professional Psychology. She has recruited and advised prospective students to law, business, public administration, and psychology graduate programs. Dr. Vu has been with California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH) for the past nine years as the Assistant Dean in the College of Business Administration and Public Policy overseeing the MPA program. Her research background focuses on human resources and organizational development.

Student Research Conference Discussion Panel 

11:00 am - 1:00 pm - Wednesday, March 3, 2021

The Journey to Research: More than One Road: Discuss their personal journeys to research careers. First hour will feature researchers from the CSUDH campus and second hour will feature researchers from other campuses/institutions.  Q & A sessions will follow.

Mark Carrier, PhD
Professor, Department of Psychology
College of Natural and Behavioral Sciences
California State University, Dominguez Hills
Research: Applied Cognition, Psychology of Technology, Cognitive Psychology, Critical Thinking

Dr. Carrier’s area of research expertise is the effect of personal technology use upon our brains and behavior. His work helps to document and to find the reasons that children, students, and regular people engage in odd, destructive, or maladaptive behaviors when using computer technology. It also helps to generate ways that people can assess, monitor, and change their behaviors at home, in the workplace, or at school. Research techniques and tools that are used by Carrier include laboratory-based psychology experiments, online anonymous questionnaires, and brain imaging.

Kevin Montes, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology
College of Natural and Behavioral Sciences
California State University, Dominguez Hills
Research: Addiction, alcohol use, marijuana use, tobacco use, gambling, identity (e.g., recovery/drinking identity), protective behavioral strategies, motives, outcome expectancies, health disparities, and advance quantitative analyses.

Dr. Montes’ research focuses on the following areas: addiction, alcohol use, marijuana use, tobacco use, gambling, identity (e.g., recovery/drinking identity), protective behavioral strategies, motives, outcome expectancies, health disparities, and advanced quantitative analyses. Dr. Montes received a highly competitive NIH-K01 award that focuses on elucidating identity change as a mechanism of behavior change in alcohol recovery. Dr. Montes is also involved in two large multi-site addiction studies and is a consulting editor of the peer-reviewed journal, Psychology of Addictive Behaviors.

Philip Vieira, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Psychology
College of Natural and Behavioral Sciences
California State University, Dominguez Hills
Research: Behavioral Neuroscience, neuroplasticity, addiction, pharmacokinetics.

Dr. Vieira is a graduate of Fresno State University. His research follows two different lines: 1) neurobiology of drug addiction and 2) STEM education research to improve underrepresented student success.

From Dr. Vieira’s faculty profile: Human behavior ultimately derives from changes within the brain. The broader scope of my research is to understand how neurobiology supports these changes. I currently study the role drugs of abuse play in exploiting the brain’s adaptive framework to produce maladaptive (addiction) behavior. I am also interested in the individual differences that interact with the environment to create the conditions that support drug addiction. These include epigenetics, endocrinology and drug metabolism. To that end, I am also involved in work that has developed next generation biosensors to detect real-time changes in individual drug kinetics and dynamics.

María Resendiz, PhD, CCC-SLP
Associate Professor, Communication Sciences and Disorders
Texas State University

Dr. Resendiz earned her Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also earned her Bachelor of Science and Master of Arts degrees – all in Communication Sciences and Disorders. She has worked with bilingual children and children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds in school, rehabilitation, and early childhood settings. Her research includes a collaboration with Engineering to design an app for people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The app uses machine learning and based on visual, audio, and gesture information, identifies the emotion of the conversational partner for the person with ASD. She also conducts research in partnership with Austin Smiles focused on creating sustainable models for training therapists in their home country using telepractice.

Laura Rhinehart, PhD
Assistant Researcher, Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners and Social Justice
University of California, Los Angeles

Dr. Rhinehart holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a Master of Education degree in Urban Education from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She completed her Doctor of Philosophy degree in Special Education at UCLA in 2019. Her work focuses on a federally funded project, Towards Early, Differential Intervention for Children with Dyslexia. This project aims to determine the overall effectiveness of different systematic intervention programs for particular profiles of students identified in Kindergarten with, or at-risk of, dyslexia and/or reading failure

Maryanne Wolf, PhD
Professor, University of California, Los Angeles
Research: Global literacy of neuroscience and reading

Dr. Wolf is a scholar, teacher, and advocate for children and literacy around the world. She is the Director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and the former John DiBiaggio Professor of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University. She is Chapman University’s Presidential Fellow (2018–2020) and past Fellow (2014–2015) and present Board Member of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Her awards include highest honors from the International Dyslexia Association (Geschwind and Orton awards) and The Dyslexia Foundation (Einstein Prize); Distinguished Researcher of the Year for Learning Disabilities in Australia; Distinguished Teacher of the Year from the state and national American Psychological Association; Fulbright Fellowship ( Germany); and the Christopher Columbus Award for Intellectual Innovation for co-founding Curious Learning: A Global Literacy Initiative, with deployments in Africa, India, Australia, and rural United States. She is external advisor to the International Monetary Fund, Canadian Children’s Literacy Foundation, and other boards, and a frequent speaker about global literacy at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. She has authored over 170 scientific publications; the RAVE-O reading curriculum for dyslexia; RAN/RAS tests of reading prediction with Martha Denckla; and Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (15 translations; HarperCollins, 2007); Tales of Literacy for the 21st Century (Oxford University Press, 2016); and Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital Culture (11 translations, HarperCollins, 2018). In the last year (October 2019), she received both the national award from the Reading League for her contributions on reading research and the Walter Ong Award for her work on the effects of different mediums on the intellectual development of the species. Most recently she was elected a permanent member of the Pontifical Academy of Science for her work in neuroscience and education.