About Us

Chandra A. Reynolds (chandra.reynolds@colorado.edu)

[Ph.D., University of Southern California, 1994]

Chandra Reynolds is currently a Professor at the Institute for Behavioral Genetics and the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience at the University of Colorado Boulder and is a Professor Emerita of Psychology at University of California Riverside. Her research interests center around the interrelationships between health and cognition across development. She directs projects that consider the genetic and environmental etiologies of cognitive aging, including gene pathways and their possible interaction with environmental factors. Additional projects include examinations of early life factors and contexts that influence cognitive, physical health and well-being profiles into early adulthood and across the lifespan.

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Anqing Zheng (anqing.zheng@colorado.edu)

Anqing Zheng is a postdoctoral researcher in the BBR lab. Her primary interest concerns the ways genetically influenced characteristics combine and interact with the environment to guide each person’s psychological characteristics (i.e., personality, socio-emotional skills, cognitive ability). She is also interested in representing dynamic relations among psychological variables, as well as the antecedents and causes of those variables. She prefers to approach these issues using large representative datasets and meta-analyses and embraces the opportunities brought by big data and machine learning paradigms. In Anqing’s spare time, she is a big fan of skiing, leisure snowboarding, occasional indoor climbing, and pouring love to her (slightly) psychopathy cat.

Alex Sheppard (Alex.Sheppard@colorado.edu)

Kiana Siegal (Kiana.Siegal@colorado.edu)

Kiana is a Professional Research Assistant for the lab at IBG.  She recently graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in Psychology from the University of Colorado, Boulder.  Kiana's work in the lab includes data analysis and data management and documentation.  She is currently working toward graduate school and pursuing a career in Clinical Psychology.  In her free time, Kiana enjoys hiking, skiing, cooking, and traveling. 

Tina Vo, Ph.D.
Tina completed her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology at UCR in June 2024. She is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar with the Vietnam Era Twin Study of Aging (VETSA) at the University of California, San Diego. Her research focuses on exploring the genetic and environmental interplay between sleep characteristics and cognition.

Archana B. Balasubramanian, Ph.D.
Archana completed her Ph.D. in Psychology at UCR in June 2010. Her research topics included the contributions of stress and inflammation on cognitive change. She served as a postdoctoral fellow at the UCI Mind Research Unit following the completion of her Ph.D. and is now a Research Associate at UCSD in the Neuroscience department.

Brittany L. Bannon, Ph.D.
Brittany completed her Ph.D. in Social/Personality Psychology with an emphasis in Health Psychology at UCR in June 2017 under chair Dr. Chandra A. Reynolds. During her tenure in the program, she was co-advised by Dr. M. Robin DiMatteo, Emeritus, and Dr. Kate Sweeny. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Utah, Department of Population Health Sciences.

Ryan Bruellman, Ph.D.
Ryan graduated with his Ph.D. in the Genetics, Genomics and Bioinformatics program at the University of California Riverside. His research dissertation focused on how behaviors such as physical activity and diet influence health during early aging.  His work also seeks to understand how our food environment can shape health outcomes and behaviors.  In his spare time, Ryan enjoys hiking, pickleball, swimming, and many other outdoor activities.

Cleo Burce
Cleo served as a research associate on the IGEMS project in our UCR lab, including data management, analysis, and documentation, and went on to CSU San Diego master’s program in psychology. Since 2017 she has been serving as an associate at the Naval Center for Combat and Operational Stress Control.

Katherine Duggan, Ph.D.
Kat completed her Ph.D. in Psychology at UCR in June 2016, under chair Howard Friedman with Chandra Reynolds and Sara Mednick serving as committee members. Her research focuses on personality and sleep trajectories in childhood and adolescence, as well as the mediators of the sleep-health relationship throughout the lifespan. Subsequently, she served as a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh. Since 2019 she has been Assistant Professor, Social and Health Psychology, at North Dakota State University.

Faredun Dungore
Faredun (Fred) was the previous Lab Manager for Dr. Reynold’s Lab at UCR. He graduated with his Bachelor’s Degree in Neuroscience from the University of California Riverside. He is currently attending the Western University of Health Sciences with the goal of becoming a Neurosurgeon. During his leisure time, he enjoys traveling, listening to music, and volunteering at nearby animal shelters.

Briana N. Horwitz, Ph.D.
Briana was a NRSA F32 postdoctoral fellow recipient, spending time at Penn State and UC Riverside 2011-2013. Her expertise lies in family processes and well-being outcomes in childhood and adulthood. Dr. Horwitz is now a faculty member at CSU Fullerton.

Ida Karlsson, PhD
Ida was a visiting postdoctoral scholar at UCR under the Fulbright program during the fall of 2019 and early spring 2020. She is a postdoctoral researcher at Jönköping University, Sweden. Ida’s main research interest is the genetic and epigenetic epidemiology of complex diseases, mainly focusing on aging-related outcomes.

Jennifer Koontz, Ph.D.
Jennifer completed her Ph.D. in Psychology at UCR in September 2010. Her research topics included the prediction of dementia subtypes via cognitive and vascular risk trajectories. She served as a postdoctoral fellow at the UCI Mind Research Unit following the completion of her Ph.D.

Maria Luna
Maria was a  Lab Assistant for Dr. Reynold’s Lab at UCR. She is currently attending David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA with interests in Family Medicine.

Elizabeth Munoz, Ph.D.
Liz was a NRSA F32 postdoctoral fellow recipient in the BBR lab at UCR and is now is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences at UT Austin. Dr Munoz considers psychological, environmental, and biological influences, along with their interactions, and addresses early and later influences on cognitive health. In particular, she considers social/contextual and psychological sources of stress on cognitive health.

Chloe Myers
Chloe Myers completed her master’s degree in the spring of 2021 at UCR. Her research interests included the genetic and environmental influences on the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), and associations of BDNF and exercise with cognition. She is now in North Carolina and enjoys creating digital art, reading, and exploring with her dogs.

Dianna Phillips, Ph.D.
Dianna completed her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology at UCR in December 2019, and is currently a lab affiliate. Her research interests include features of loneliness (level, duration) and cognitive change in adults as well as DNA methylation at particular sites that may serve as an epigenetic mechanism of these relations.

Brittany (Paige) Trubenstein, Ph.D.
Paige completed her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology at UCR in July 2020. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Angelo State University, Department of Psychology and Sociology. Her research interests include investigating the interplay across multiple domains of activity engagement across the lifespan and how engagement relates to cognitive functioning. She also applies geospatial analysis to evaluate disparities and differences across rural and urban residing individuals that may influence cognitive stability and change.

Loryana Vie, Ph.D.
Loryana completed her Ph.D. in Psychology at UCR in December 2012. Her research interests included studying the relationships between marriage, personality, health, and longevity using data from the 8-decade long Terman Life Cycle Study. For her dissertation, she considered predictors and outcomes of social influences on health behaviors in a sample of college students. Dr. Vie is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Positive Psychology Center, University of Pennsylvania, and a member of the Research Facilitation Team, Army Analytics Group in Monterey, CA.

Joey White
Joey was the previous Lab Manager for Dr. Reynold's Lab at IBG. He graduated with his Bachelor's Degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is currently attending the University of Manitoba, with a goal of pursuing a career in Evolutionary Genetics. During his leisure time, he enjoys mountaineering, biking, skiing, cooking, and spending time outside. 

Lauren Whitehurst, Ph.D.
Lauren completed her Ph.D. at UCR in August 2018 under co-chairs Sara Mednick and Chandra Reynolds. Lauren’s research interests entail developing both a conceptual and practical understanding of how the body and the brain interact to produce regulatory effects on sleep-related health outcomes and how physiological biomarkers can be harnessed to understand typical functioning and disease states. Subsequently, Lauren was a Postdoctoral Fellow, Psychology and Medicine, Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco. She is now an Assistant Professor in Psychology at the University of Kentucky since 2020.

Catalina Zavala, Ph.D.
Catalina completed her Ph.D. in Psychology at UCR in August 2014, and served as a postdoctoral scholar in the lab until November 2014. Her research topics included genetic and environmental factors that impact cognitive development across the life span, particularly the predictive value of socioeconomic status measures, including subjective measures, on cognitive change.  Catalina was a postdoctoral scholar at the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden, and is now a Postdoctoral Scholar – Research Associate, University of Southern California Department of Psychology.