Katherine (Kat) All is in her third year of Penn State’s Child Clinical Psychology program. Her primary mentor is Cynthia Huang-Pollock, Ph.D. Kat’s research centers on improving the assessment of pediatric psychopathology.
Kat graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology and a minor in Hispanic studies. Her honor’s thesis, What’s in it for me? Callous-unemotional traits and prosocial behavior, was awarded the Morris Viteles Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research in Psychology and resulted in a first-authored manuscript published in Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology. Following graduation, Kat was a Developmental Psychopathology and Social Neuroscience Fellow in the Social and Affective Neuroscience of Autism Program at Yale University. During her fellowship, she studied the assessment and diagnosis of children with neurodevelopmental disorders with Dr. Katarzyna Chawarska and had an independent first-authored project published in Autism Research. At Penn State, Kat has been able to continue investigating the nuances of assessment and how this can inform clinical work. For her master’s, she examined the clinical utility of jointly assessing psychopathology and personality factors in children and how these behaviors can be modeled. She found that assessing personality factors such as positive affectivity aids in the assessment of depressive disorders. Her work resulted in a first-authored publication in Personality and Individual Differences, and she was competitively selected to present her findings at the biennial meeting of the International Society for Research in Child and Adolescent Psychopathology conference in Vancouver, Canada. To date, she has 8 published papers (3 first-authored) and 16 presentations (4 first-authored). She has taught, guest-lectured, mentored, and designed and led workshops. Her performance as a teaching assistant was so strong that she was awarded summer funding in 2025 to work one-on-one with a professor to revamp the graduate statistics course and convert all course content to R.
As a Strumpf Scholar, Kat plans to initiate a new study to determine how parents’ empathic statements may differ depending on their children’s callous and unemotional behaviors. She hopes to use this study as the basis for her dissertation. Funds from the award will provide the opportunity for data collection, coding, analysis, and writing during the summers of 2026 and 2027. The Strumpf Scholar Award will help Kat lay the groundwork for an academic career examining the intersections of parenting behaviors, children’s temperament factors, and child psychopathology.