Human Development Student

Robby Quintana is a doctoral student in the Human Development area within the Department of Educational Psychology. He is working in the Mathematics Education and Learning Lab with Percival Matthews. Robby is interested in the relationship between spatial ability and mathematics.

Ashley Reece (Ezpeleta) is a doctoral student in the Human Development area working with Dr. Haley Vlach in the Learning, Cognition, and Development Lab. She received her B.A. in Psychology and a minor in Linguistics from Miami University. She was also the lab manager for Dr. Ed Hubbard’s Educational Neuroscience Lab before joining the PhD program. Ashley’s work investigates how lower (e.g. biological)- and higher (e.g. meta)- memory processes influence young children’s language learning, with the goal of applying her work to educational settings.

Isaiah Stevens is a doctoral student in the Human Development area within the Department of Educational Psychology. He is interested in the way that students conceptualize mathematics problems. He is a member of the Mathematics Education Learning and Development (MELD) lab with Dr. Percival Matthews. He involves himself in the postsecondary mathematics community through educational opportunities in the mathematics department at UW-Madison. In his free time, he plays basketball, does landscape photography, and cooks for his family.

Yi Tong is a doctoral student in the Human Development area within the Department of Educational Psychology. She is a member of the Learning, Cognition, and Development lab with Dr. Haley Vlach.

Priscilla Tovar-Perez is a doctoral student in the Human Development area within the Department of Educational Psychology. She is a member of Dr. Amy Bellmore’s research team, which studies school-based peer relationships during adolescence. Priscilla’s research examines how adolescents make meaning of their social and academic environments, and how these experiences shape their well-being and development. Her work explores how friendship and identity contribute to adolescent girls’ body image and sense of self, as well as how teens use Internet memes to cope with stressful events, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. 

As a first-generation college student, Priscilla is passionate about applying insights from developmental psychology to create more supportive and inclusive educational spaces. She aims to bridge research and practice to help students feel seen, supported, and empowered to grow academically, especially those navigating higher education for the first time. 

Anna Veenendall is a doctoral student in the Human Development area within the Department of Educational Psychology. She works with Dr. Christy Starr. She earned her BS in Neurobiology and Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also worked as a research assistant in Dr. Judith Harackiewicz’s PULSE lab. Before starting her graduate studies, Anna served as a research specialist under Dr. Andy Garbacz in School Psychology at UW. Her research interests center on the barriers and costs that adolescents and college students face in pursuing careers in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.