Christina Esparza-Cassidy

Ed-GRS Fellow

Christina is a Human Development PhD student within the Department of Educational Psychology. She is a researcher in the Brain and Early Experience (BEE) Lab which examines how early life conditions of poverty influence structural and functional brain development, cognitive development, and early executive function. As a nontraditional student, Christina earned her BA in Psychology from Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago where she focused on the development of children’s analytic reasoning and metacognition. Her current research interests center the environmental and biological factors that influence neurodevelopment and cognitive development from the prenatal period through the first years of early childhood.