Ayesha Smith (’25)

Ayesha Smith is a Penn State senior majoring in Psychology. She is interested in conducting research on how anxiety can co-occur with eating disorders. Ayesha’s research interest comes from her personal connections with people who have been affected by anxiety and coped with it through disordered eating. She noticed how this pattern develops among people who migrated to the United States, and she is interested in investigating potential contributing factors for this co-occurrence.

Ayesha works as an undergraduate research assistant in the Cognition, Affect, and Temperament (CAT) Lab with Dr. Koraly Pérez-Edgar. The CAT Lab examines how an individual’s temperament, emotion, and attention can influence developmental outcomes. Ayesha is a behavioral coder on the Parent-To-Child Anxiety Transmission (PCAT) Study, which explores how parents and children develop anxiety and how their anxiety affects each other. As a coder, she observes recordings of parents and children performing tasks and evaluates their behavior by converting their interactions into codes for statistical analysis. After graduation, Ayesha plans to pursue a master’s degree in mental health counseling to become a licensed mental health counselor. She is also interested in pursuing a doctoral degree in health behavior and hopes to open her own private counseling practice in the future.

Outside of research, Ayesha is a recruiting coordinator for Active Minds at Penn State World Campus. She also loves to dance (currently taking an Afro-Latino dance class), crate dig for records, binge-watch retro tv, and spend time with her cat.

The CSC wishes Ayesha all the best in her future academic pursuits!