Kelsey Evans (’24)

Kelsey Evans is a fourth-year Penn State student from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. A Psychology major, she plans to graduate in spring 2024. Kelsey’s interest in psychology became clear after taking Developmental Psychology during her second year at Penn State. In this course, she learned that childhood stress and negative experiences may be associated with adverse physiological, social, and mental outcomes that can last into adulthood. She was particularly intrigued by the idea that important attachments in a child’s life may help them better adjust to traumatic experiences. Kelsey’s later work in Friendship Group, an intervention based on helping children develop social skills, as well as her interest in the association between stress and child outcomes, has cemented her plans to attend graduate school to become a clinical psychologist.

Kelsey has been involved in three different labs during her time at Penn State. She worked with Dr. Rina D. Eiden’s Development, Risk, and Resilience Lab, focusing on the association between parental substance use and the development of childhood self-regulation, where she was involved in recruiting and conducting systematic reviews to understand the development of childhood internalizing and externalizing problems. In the Relationships and Stress Lab led by Dr. Amy Marshall, Kelsey worked primarily on the CIRCLES study, which explores the context of aggressive behavior and the co-occurrence of inter-parental and parent-to-child aggression. As an undergraduate research assistant on this project, Kelsey coded family conflicts into different topic categories for further analysis. Recently, Kelsey joined Dr. Chad Shenk’s Shenk Lab, where she has been coding parent-child interactions to assess levels of positive and negative affect from children. Kelsey has been working on her honors thesis, mentored by Dr. Eiden, in which she is exploring the association between marital conflict and kindergarten externalizing problems in the context of fathers’ alcohol use disorder.

Outside of her research studies, Kelsey is an active member in the Penn State Psi Chi National Honor Society and enjoys reading, collecting different kinds of plants, and being outside.

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