Faculty Research Interests
Kristen Jennings Black (Ph.D., Clemson University)
Dr. Black’s primary research interests are in the area of Occupational Health Psychology. Specifically, she studies workplace stress, recovery experiences, social support, and employee health, with a focus on high-stress work environments. Her recent focus is on perceptions of stress in the workplace, as well as organizational and workgroup norms around stress. She is also broadly interested in vulnerable workgroups, such as low-income workers experiencing financial vulnerability, and applying research to develop interventions and resources to protect and promote worker health. You can find out more about my current and past work by visiting my lab website: https://sites.google.com/mocs.utc.edu/kristen-j-black
Amanda Clark (Ph.D., University of Waterloo)
Dr. Clark is interested in studying attention-related errors of everyday living and her work focuses on the development of assessments that are ecologically valid and clinically relevant. In her research, she studies healthy younger and older adults as well as individuals who experience executive dysfunction due to a traumatic brain injury or stroke. Dr. Clark integrates her research in the courses she teaches, primarily Principles of Neuropsychology, Psychology of Aging, and Biological Psychology. To learn more, visit the Assessing Cognition Lab: https://sites.google.com/mocs.utc.edu/assessing-cognition-lab
Christopher J. L. Cunningham (Ph.D., Bowling Green State University)
Dr. Chris Cunningham teaches advanced courses in organizational and occupational health psychology research and applications; applied psychological consulting skills and ethics; organizational development, design, and change; career development; research and statistical methods; and assessment and evaluation design and validation, primarily to students in the M.S. degree program in industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology. His current research addresses multiple OHP topics, including stress and recovery processes and practices; the influence of individual differences and environmental factors on cognitions and behaviors; and the challenges and realities associated with work and nonwork interrole dynamics. Dr. Cunningham also serves as the Graduate Program Director for UTC's M.S. degree program in I-O Psychology. Click the following link for more information about Dr. Cunningham and the research being done in his Healthy and Optimal Work (HOW) Lab: https://blog.utc.edu/cjlcunningham/
Pratibha Deepak (Ph.D., Florida Institute of Technology)
Dr. Pratibha Deepak’s research focuses on contextual leadership: interplay of leadership across culture, diversity, followers, and circumstances. Her current work, for instance, explores gender prejudice in employees' perceptions of their transgressive leaders. Her research also examines diversity issues in the workplace such as cultural differences in employees' work attitudes, systemic barriers at workplace for women that creates power inequality and disadvantages for women. Her additional research interests include the analysis of the future of work and the influence of the VUCA (volatile, unpredictable, complex, and ambiguous) environment on workplaces and their employees. Additionally, Pratibha is interested in research techniques. She has, for instance, conducted both qualitative and quantitative research, and her work (past and present) research incorporates a variety of analytical methodologies, such as Social Network Analysis (SNA), latent profile analysis, and Structural Equation Modeling. As a practitioner, Pratibha has years of expertise working across industries (fortune 500 businesses) and for international humanitarian organizations (United Nations).
Bret Eschman (Ph.D., University of Tennessee)
Dr. Eschman is a Developmental Cognitive Neuroscientist specializing in infant visual cognition. As the director of the Visual Memory and Attention Development Lab (VMAD), his research focuses on key cognitive domains such as attention, memory, perception, and multisensory integration. He employs innovative methodologies (e.g., eye-tracking, online assessment, machine learning) to assess individual differences in early cognitive abilities and investigates how these differences might help identify children at risk for language, social, and cognitive delays. The goal of this work is to uncover the contributing factors that could predict long-term developmental outcomes. Specifically, some of his recent work explores how certain health disparities, such as low socioeconomic status (SES), might impact these skills early in development. Dr. Eschman’s research, though grounded in basic science, informs interventions to support at-risk populations and improve developmental trajectories.
In addition to his developmental work, Dr. Eschman is interested in individual differences in neural functioning in adult populations. Some of his recent research explores the interactions between attention and visual working memory, how these dynamics drive visual exploration and experience, and ultimately how early experiences may impact neural functioning. He is also interested in how these foundational components of cognition relate to higher-level cognitive functions (e.g., intelligence) and how they may be affected by environmental factors such as stress. To learn more, visit the Visual Memory and Attention Development Lab: https://sites.google.com/view/utc-vmad-lab/home
*Accepting new students for the 2025-2026 academic year
Feng Guo (Ph.D., Bowling Green State University)
Dr. Feng Guo's research interests lie in the areas of machine learning, psychometrics, and research methods. Particularly, his research focuses on the future of work, and he is interested in applying novel machine learning and big data methods to advance the understanding towards workplace behavior and performance. For instance, his research involves applying natural language processing (NLP) and novel psychometrics techniques to address practical challenges in selection, testing, and performance appraisal. On the applied side, he has years of working experience as a data analyst and a consultant. In his leisure time, he finds delight in exploring breakthrough topics in diverse fields, notably mathematics and physics, indulging his curiosity beyond his primary research interests. Additionally, he enjoys playing basketball and watching various construction project videos.
Ralph Hood (Ph.D., University of Nevada)
Dr. Hood is a social psychologist whose major interests are in philosophical psychology and the psychology of religion. He holds appointments as Professor of Psychology and Leroy Martin Professor of Religious Studies. Dr. Hood is co-founder of the International Journal of the Psychology of Religion and a past editor of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. He is past president of APA's Division 36 and a recipient of its William James award for excellence in research, as well as its Mentor and Distinguished Service awards. His major research interests are reflected in his publications. He is co-author of The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach, editor of The Handbook of Religious Experience and co-editor of Measures of Religiosity. Other books include Dimensions of Mystical Experiences: Empirical Studies and Psychological Links; The Psychology of Religious Fundamentalism, Blood & Fire, Them That Believe; The Power and Meaning of the Christian Serpent Handling Tradition; The Semantics and Psychology of Spirituality: A Cross-Cultural Analysis; and Psychological and Spiritual Transformation in a Substance Abuse Program: The Lazarus Project.
Ashley Howell (Ph.D., Ohio University)
Dr. Howell is a licensed clinical psychologist and scientist. Her research focuses on transdiagnostic elements of interpersonal fear, which may contribute to various anxiety-related disorders, using a biopsychosocial approach. Specific interests include social evaluation fears and avoidance (e.g., social anxiety disorder), and their potential cross-cultural differences, victimization and maltreatment (e.g., PTSD), neuropsychological performance (e.g., executive functioning), and psychophysiology (e.g., EDA, PPG, EMG, fNIRS, eye-tracking). She founded and directs the Understanding Mechanisms of Anxiety & Trauma (U*MATr) lab in UTC’s Department of Psychology. Students in the U*MATr lab will have opportunities to engage with basic science or early translational/applied science methodologies that are commonly used in emotional disorders research. To learn more, visit the U*MATr lab: https://u-matr.weebly.com/
*Accepting new students for the 2025-2026 academic year
Brian O'Leary (Ph.D., Tulane University)
Dr. O'Leary's research interests focus on the effects of organizational justice on individual, group, and organizational performance. This is an outgrowth of his interest in the area of racial diversity in the workplace and employment discrimination law, as the ultimate goal of the civil rights movement was to create a just society and a correspondingly fair workplace.
David F. Ross (Ph.D., Cornell University)
Dr. Ross is interested in developmental and social psychology. He conducts research on children's and adults' eyewitness memory and on adults' views of children's believability as witnesses. He has edited several books on the topics of children's and adults' eyewitness testimony, and consulted with judges and attorneys on children's and adults' eyewitness issues. Dr. Ross teaches courses in Social Psychology, Psychology and Law, and Developmental Psychology.
*Accepting new students for the 2025-2026 academic year
Jill Talley Shelton (Ph.D., Louisiana State University)
Dr. Shelton is the director of the Cognitive Aging, Learning, and Memory (CALM) lab, and both undergraduate and graduate students play an integral role in her research program. The CALM Lab team conducts research designed to translate basic cognitive science to better understand everyday human cognition. They use behavioral, eye-tracking, and self-report measures to investigate how individual differences and environmental factors influence people’s ability to remember to complete their goals. (termed prospective memory). The CALM lab team examines how prospective memory evolves over the adult lifespan, and they are particularly interested in improving academic and self-care goal completion in college students, Dr. Shelton’s team also strives to maximize success in college students through experiential learning opportunities and encouraging effective behavioral strategies. Additionally, Dr. Shelton has been a member of the low vision/blind community since childhood, and she engages in scholarship and community outreach focused on empowering disabled individuals. To learn more, visit the CALM Lab website: https://sites.google.com/mocs.utc.edu/shelton-calm-lab
*Accepting new students for the 2025-2026 academic year
Max Teaford (Ph.D., Miami University, Ohio)
The Multisensory-Multisystem (MS2) lab conducts interdisciplinary research aimed at understanding the merging of information from different sensory modalities (i.e., multisensory integration) in the context of body ownership (i.e., the feeling that our body is our own) and spatial orientation (i.e., knowing where our body is relative to our external environment). We are particularly interested in how peripheral physiology impacts and is impacted by multisensory integration in the aforementioned contexts. Students in the MS2 lab will get the opportunity to work with a variety of different technologies including virtual reality. To learn more, visit the Multisensory-Multisystem (MS2) lab: https://sites.google.com/mocs.utc.edu/ms2lab/
*Accepting new students for the 2025-2026 academic year
Ruth Walker (Ph.D., The University of Akron)
As a feminist developmental psychologist, with specialized training in adulthood and aging, Dr. Walker’s research broadly focuses on the study of social inequalities across the lifespan. Her interest is in both the impact of social inequalities as well as how to ameliorate said inequalities through targeted interventions. Her research has looked at how ageism and sexism intersect to impact how individuals are treated at home and in the workplace. She has also studied the impact of stigma and bias on transgender-identified individuals’ perceptions of their ability to age successfully and their need for care in later life. Since her time working on bystander intervention programming to prevent sexual assault in graduate school, she has collaboratively studied the perceptions of victims of sexual assault. Her current research initiatives continue to focus generally on ageism, sexism, anti-LGBT bias, perceptions of sexual assault survivors, and interventions to improve health and well-being in later life. To learn more, visit the BESTEST Lab website: https://sites.google.com/view/bestestlab/home
*Accepting new students for the 2025-2026 academic year
Ricardo A. Wilhelm, (Ph.D., University of Alabama)
Dr. Wilhelm is an affective and social neuroscientist focusing on neural activity markers of emotion, attention, and motivation processing using electroencephalography (EEG). His research in affective and social neuroscience uses multi-modal EEG signal measurements (i.e., frequency, ERPs) to study individual and social neural processes within the context of: (1) General normative affective functions, (2) clinically-oriented impairments in affect (e.g., substance use; mood-related disorders), and (3) affective mechanisms underlying resilience to mental health risks in general and minority populations.
*Accepting new students for the 2025-2026 academic year
Amye R. Warren (Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology)
Dr. Warren is a developmental psychologist with research interests in memory and language skills in preschool and school-aged children. Her current research applications include children's testimony in legal cases, training programs to improve the skills of those who interview child witnesses, perceptions of child abuse allegations, and juvenile interrogations and confessions. She is also working with law enforcement officers to assist in evaluating and improving their training to deescalate crisis situations and encounters with autistic individuals or other challenges. Dr. Warren regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in developmental psychology (child development and applied developmental) as well as graduate courses in teaching psychology and research methods.