Meet the Team
Marcia Winter
Director
Marcia Winter, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Rochester and completed post-doctorate work at Syracuse University and the University of Rochester Medical Center. Her research focuses on child physical and emotional health and well-being, and in particular on how children and families adapt to potentially stressful situations.
Email: mawinter@vcu.edu
Casey Burton
Doctoral Student
Casey earned her bachelor's degree in Psychology and Religious Studies from the University of Virginia in 2019. She went on to obtain a master’s degree in Applied Developmental Psychology from the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education in the spring of 2020 and joined the VCU Developmental Psychology doctoral program later that year. Her research focuses on the individual and contextual factors that can inform children's perceptions of traumatic experiences and overall development. Specifically, she is interested in parent-child interactions and social-emotional development in the context of child maltreatment.
Becka Hoppe
Doctoral Student
Becka joined the doctoral program in Developmental Psychology at VCU in 2019 with a BA in Psychology from Rider University and post-bacc experience in higher education and grief therapy intervention. Her research interests focus on the influence of major life stressors on child development and family functioning. Becka is particularly interested in how children adapt and make meaning of parental death, transitions in roles and responsibilities in the family system following this loss, and how this impacts child adjustment. She aims to employ mixed methods and study children at various developmental stages to better understand adaptational responses to profound stress and to inform positive child mental health, development, and coping skills.
Sydney Sumrall
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Doctoral Student
Sydney joined the lab as a doctoral student in the clinical psychology program in 2021. After graduating from Emory University in 2019 with her B.A. in Psychology, she worked as a postbac at the National Human Genome Research Institute where she studied family support networks in caregivers of children with rare diseases. She is interested in understanding how family processes can promote child resilience. Her current work focuses on identifying how families can mitigate risk to children's mental health during stressful medical experiences such as pediatric cancer. Outside of school, Sydney enjoys rock climbing and cooking vegetarian food.
Lab Alumni
Nour Al Ghriwati, Ph.D.
Doctoral Student 2014-2020
Dr. Nour Al Ghriwati was a CHAMP Lab member and student in the VCU Clinical Psychology program (Child and Adolescent Track) from 2014 – 2020. She completed her pre-doctoral clinical internship at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (2020) and is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health. Nour is interested in understanding family factors that may serve as risk or protective factors for children with chronic illnesses; she is also interested in understanding mental health outcomes associated with pediatric illnesses and treatment burdens. Her broader goals include developing more integrative bio-psychosocial models for childhood illness and translating these models into interventions for affected children and their families.
Jessica Greenlee, Ph.D.
Doctoral Student 2014-2019
Dr. Jessica Greenlee entered the developmental psychology doctoral program at VCU in 2014 and graduated in 2019, when she went on to a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Waisman Center. In 2021, Jessie began a position as an Assistant Professor at her alma mater, Kenyon College. Jessie’s research is rooted in family systems theory and focuses on families of children with a chronic illness or disability. She is particularly interested in elucidating the positive and negative aspects of caring for a child with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and how culture frames the ways in which families cope. Jessie’s doctoral research was funded by a prestigious two-year Weatherstone fellowship from Autism Speaks.
Google Scholar, ResearchGate profile
Cathryn Richmond, Ph.D.
Doctoral Student 2016-2020
Cathryn received her Ph.D from VCU in December 2020. Her research interests relate to how children, adolescents, and young adults develop their cultural moral identity through cognitive, social, and emotional processes and the way in which this may influence subsequent experiences of intellectual humility, social empathy, and altruistic behavior. To do so, she incorporates consideration of individual (e.g., identity intersectionality and open-mindedness), experiential (e.g., exposure to both acute and historical trauma), and contextual (e.g., social norms and resource competition) influences within her conceptualizations of identity and moral development. In the future, she hopes to help translate this research into more developmentally appropriate, empirically-based prevention and policy programs. Cathryn has been consistently involved in advocacy work, for example as national representative for the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Advocacy Coordinating Team (ACT) and as student representative on the Board of Directors and the chair of the Justice Reform Task Force for the Global Alliance for Behavioral Health and Social Justice.
Takia Williams, M.S.
Graduate Student 2018-2020
Ms. Takia Williams was a member of the CHAMP lab in 2018-2020 while she completed her Master of Science in Microbiology and Immunology. Takia’s master’s thesis, Associations Between Stress, Racial Discrimination, and Cytokine Levels in Black Americans, examined the effects of racial discrimination on inflammation in adults. Takia is currently pursuing her Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree at Virginia Tech.