Laura Shillingsburg (’19)

Laura Shillingsburg is a Penn State senior psychology major graduating in Spring 2019. During her junior year, Laura joined Dr. Sandy Azar’s lab where she worked on two projects. One of the projects investigates social information processing, sleep, and child neglect. With this project, Laura contributed to teams working on coding videos, calling participants, and entering data.  For the second project, the Home Safety Hero project, Laura helped work on project development related to creating an innovative computer game designed to help mothers master home safety in order to prevent child neglect.  She assisted in the creation of the content for the game, recorded voiceovers, and attended meetings with a team of programmers in engineering. Laura help present preliminary data at a Pediatric Research Conference at Hershey Medical Center and at a Head Start Conference. In addition, Laura investigated gender differences in performance on the Home Safety game with a sample of young adults and presented her findings at a Psi Chi Conference in Spring 2019. During her senior year, Laura joined Dr. Pamela Cole’s lab where she worked as a research assistant on The Development of Self-Regulation Dynamics (DYN-o-SR) Project and assisted with collecting participant data and coding video.

As a result of these research and clinical opportunities, Laura plans to pursue a position as a research coordinator or find a clinical position after graduation. She hopes to gain more experience with clinical populations in order to later apply to graduate programs in child clinical psychology.

We wish Laura the best as she continues her academic pursuits!