Principal Investigator
Kaya de Barbaro, PhD
Assistant Professor, University of Texas at Austin
kaya@austin.utexas.edu
My background is in cognitive science, an interdisciplinary field where I was trained in methods and theories from psychology, neuroscience, philosophy and computer science. My expertise is in developmental science, and my work spans the domains of social, cognitive, motor, and physiological development. Across these domains, I have characterized the microdynamics of infants’ activity—as they use their eyes and hands to play and explore while expressing patterns of arousal and affect. To capture infants’ activity in high resolution, I have used tools ranging from fine-grained video analyses to eyetracking and physiological sensors. I have developed a unique methodological toolkit to make sense of and quantify theoretically-interesting patterns in these high-density datasets.
My current research is in the emerging field of computational behavioral science, bridging insights from developmental science, clinical psychology, computer science, and electrical engineering. My lab uses mobile and wearable sensors to gain unprecedented access into the daily experiences of mothers and their infants. The goals of this work are to access the basic mechanisms of maternal mental health and infant social-emotional development, and ultimately to develop “just in time” interventions for cases of high risk, such as the transmission of risks for depression from mothers to infants.
Graduate Students
Priyanka Khante, MS
6th year Electrical and Computer Engineering PhD Student
priyanka.khante@utexas.edu
Priyanka Khante received her BS in Computer Science from Stony Brook University in 2014 and her MS in Computer Science with a Robotics Portfolio from UT Austin in 2017. Her master’s thesis focused on constructing a framework for robots to learn attributes of real-world everyday objects. She proposed an unsupervised hierarchical clustering-based model that grouped objects with similar attributes based on multi-modal sensory data obtained from the robot’s physical exploration of real-world objects. She also implemented perception pipelines and constructed situated knowledge bases for robots.
Priyanka is currently a PhD student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering under the supervision of Dr. Kaya de Barbaro and Dr. Edison Thomaz. Her interest lies in the interdisciplinary field of machine learning and psychology. She has investigated the affect dynamics between mothers with a history of depression and their infants using unsupervised hierarchical clustering. Her current work uses unsupervised and semi-supervised machine learning techniques to discover meaningful events and activities in naturalistic household audio obtained from infant-worn sensors.
Megan Micheletti, MA
5th year Clinical Psychology PhD Candidate
m.micheletti@utexas.edu
Megan Micheletti graduated with honors from UCLA in 2016 with a BS in Psychobiology and a minor in Applied Developmental Psychology. As an undergraduate, she studied social development in children with autism, ADHD, and developmental delays. After graduation, she spent two years researching early social visual engagement in infants with and without autism as a Donald J. Cohen Fellow in Developmental Social Neuroscience at Emory University’s Marcus Autism Center.
Megan is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow in the Clinical Psychology PhD program under the mentorship of Dr. Kaya de Barbaro. She is interested in studying early neurotypical and neurodiverse trajectories of social-emotional development, particularly through the framework of infant-caregiver interaction. Megan’s current research examines the presence and function of infant-caregiver biobehavioral synchrony around episodes of infant distress.
Anna Madden-Rusnak, MA
4th year Developmental Psychology PhD Candidate
amaddenr@utexas.edu
Anna Madden-Rusnak joined the Daily Activity Lab in Fall 2020. Her research focuses on infant psychophysiology around everyday experiences of distress (i.e., fussing and crying) and distress resolution. She works with the lab’s wearable sensor data to track how infants express and regulate their emotions and how different caregiving actions and experiences impact this process. In the summer of 2022, she completed an internship at the Toyota Research Institute focused on mobile sensing. She has served as a committee member and co-chair of the UT Psychology Graduate Student Diversity Committee and is heavily involved in creating resources and events to share information and advice on getting involved in research and applying to graduate school.
Anna graduated from Louisiana State University (LSU) with a B.S. in Psychology in 2018 and completed her M.A. in Psychological Research at Texas State University in 2020. As an undergraduate student, she worked at a number of research labs on LSU’s campus as well as the Pennington Biomedical Research Center.
Taylor Wilds, MPS
1st year Developmental Psychology PhD Student
tlwilds@utexas.edu
Taylor Wilds (she/hers) received a B.A. in Psychology and Neuroscience from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2016. In 2020, she received an MS degree in Clinical Psychological Science from the University of Maryland, College Park. She spent the past two years researching the influence of environmental factors (e.g., social support, pollution, greenspace, community resources) on child development.
Taylor joined the Daily Activities Lab in Fall 2023 under the mentorship of Dr. Kaya de Barbaro. She is interested in a biopsychosocial model of mental health that leverages mixed methodologies within biobehavioral assessment (e.g., HRV/RSA, EMA) to examine the associations between risk and protective factors at multiple levels of a child’s ecosystem (e.g., maternal mental health, parent-child interactions, environmental factors). She is firmly committed to investing in the health and well-being of minoritized communities.
Graduate Research Assistants
Yashaswi Galhotra
Undergraduate Research Assistants
Loryn Bailey
Lab Alumni
Dr. Xuewen Yao (Data Scientist at Microsoft)
Miriam Mikhelson (MA student; current MSS student in Social Work at Bryn Mawr College)
Hannah Levin (MA student; current PhD student in Media, Technology, and Society at Northwestern University)
Mckensey Johnson (lab manager; Research Analyst at Gallup)
Lara Andres (lab manager; applying to graduate school)
Graduate Research Assistants
Li Nie
Mingyang Ke
Yicheng Zhang
Yizhen Wang
Undergraduate Research Assistants
Adrian Luong
Alexis Dominguez
Angeline Ajit
Ashna Dhaduti
Avrey Curry
Brandon Thint
Brianna Lee
Brooke Benson
Caity Campbell
Cameron Hall
Cara Coligan
Caroline Whitmarsh
Christine Liu
Daisy Green
Derian Lee
Gabby Trejo
Grace Chang
Grace Kim
Isa Barnes
Jenna Guzman
Jessie Berry
Kara Kaur
Kate Neal
Kathryn Mootz
Lesly Chavez
Loreily Limon
Mackenzie Roach
Magisha Radjendran
Mahyar Hassim
Mai Le
Myra Kurjee
Neha Momin
Nehaa Dambala
Nina Nariman
Qinwen Zhou
Rehman Zindani
Rosa Juan
Samantha Greenlaw
Udita Thapar
Vanessa Alonzo
Veronica Cantu