Pre-doctoral Trainees

Praise Owoyemi

Doctoral Student, Clinical Psychology

powoyemi1@g.ucla.edu

Praise is a second-year graduate student in the Clinical Psychology program. Broadly, her research focuses on dispositional and sociocultural variables that impact coping and psychological adjustment to a chronic illness. In addition, she aims to better understand mental health outcomes in individuals from immigrant and racial minority groups who are facing health adversity. Praise is interested in using her research to develop culturally tailored and accessible interventions to improve physical and psychological health.

Julia Yarrington, M.A.

Doctoral Student, Clinical Psychology

yarringtonjs@g.ucla.edu

Julia is a fourth year doctoral student in the Clinical Psychology program with minors in Health Psychology and Quantitative Psychology. Her research focuses on risk for and treatment of depression, anxiety, and suicide ideation. She is particularly interested in novel, personalized treatments that focus on raising positive affect, and plans to study cognitive, emotional, and health-relevant factors that mediate treatment response.

Jordan Thomas, M.A.

Doctoral Student, Clinical Psychology

thomasjl@g.ucla.edu

Jordan Thomas is a fourth-year PhD student in Clinical Psychology, with an emphasis in Health. Jordan’s research program investigates the ways in which trauma exposure and related psychopathology affects women’s physical, mental, and sexual health across the lifespan. She is interested in developing evidence-based initiatives that promote women’s health at both the individual (e.g., through clinical intervention) and population (e.g., through policy) level.

Gabrielle Rinne, M.A.

Doctoral Student, Health Psychology

gabrielle.rinne@ucla.edu

Gabrielle is a third-year graduate student in Health Psychology with a minor in Quantitative Psychology. Her research program focuses on the biobehavioral mechanisms linking exposure to stress early in development to mental health, with a particular focus on exposures in the prenatal period through childhood. Her prior research has evaluated how maternal mood in pregnancy and postpartum with influences offspring physiological reactivity and self-regulation and has examined the associations between maternal childhood family experiences and mental health in pregnancy and postpartum. She plans to extend this research to elucidate biobehavioral pathways through which prenatal and postnatal stressors combined influence mental health in children.

Post-doctoral Trainees

Jennifer Somers, Ph.D.

Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, Arizona State University

jasomer2@asu.edu

Dr. Somers’ research interest is in biobehavioral processes through which close relationships support mental and physical wellbeing. By evaluating bidirectional influences between children and their caregivers across multiple timescales (e.g., second-by-second processes that occur during social interactions, longer-term adaptation that unfolds across development), this research provides a framework for characterizing the effects of early social experiences on children’s development, which bears implications for both children and their caregiver’s wellbeing. 

Yasmin Barrientos Kofman, Ph.D.

Ph.D. in Psychological Science, UC Irvine

ykofman@psych.ucla.edu

Dr. Kofman’s research interest is in biobehavioral mechanisms linking trauma exposure and health. She is particularly interested in how exposure to gender-based forms of violence (e.g., intimate partner and sexual violence) can perpetuate mental and physical health problems in women during the perinatal period and across the lifespan more broadly. Dr. Kofman is also interested in factors of personal, cultural, and community resilience that may buffer the detrimental health effects of trauma and adversity.