Erin (Karen) Guo (’23)

Karen is a Penn State senior majoring in Biology with an emphasis on vertebrate physiology. Inspired to learn more about the science behind sleep and its impact on child development, she became a research assistant for Project SIESTA, directed by Dr. Douglas Teti. Project SIESTA focuses on understanding how sleep patterns emerge during infancy by studying both children and their parents. As a research assistant, Karen codes qualitative data for the study, including coparenting and child-parent interactions during bedtime routines, where she has gained experience analyzing and interpreting data. Karen will be presenting a poster on the indirect association between mother’s anxious and depressive symptoms and infants sleep at 6 months at the 2023 Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) conference. After the conference, she plans to work closely with her graduate student mentor, Christine Kim, to develop her research into a manuscript.

Karen credits her experience working on Project SIESTA with enabling her to gain a deeper understanding of the research field and the skills that she hopes to apply in her future career. Following graduation, she plans to finalize her Project SIESTA manuscript and spend a year engaging in community service and clinical work before attending medical school. She looks forward to a career in surgery or anesthesiology.

Outside of research, Karen is the secretary of the Academic Outreach Committee Chair in the Eberly College of Science SGA, and a member of Alpha Epsilon Delta and Beta Beta Beta (Tribeta) honor societies. She is a peer mentor through the Eberly College of Science and a mentor to high school students through Penn State’s Institute of Energy and Environment EnvironMentors Program. Karen also enjoys spending time with her hobbies, which include fencing, painting, and baking.

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