Faculty & Labs

Shayla Holub, PhD

Associate Professor, School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences
sholub@utdallas.edu

The Healthy Development Project – Directed by Dr. Shayla Holub, this lab works to understand factors that promote healthy social, emotional and physical growth in children and families. 

Heidi Kane, PhD

Associate Professor, School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences
heidi.kane@utdallas.edu

Close Relationships and Health Lab – Directed by Dr. Heidi Kane, this lab studies the basic relationship processes associated with relationship functioning and the links between romantic relationships and physical health. 

Mandy Maguire, PhD

Associate Professor, School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences
mandy.maguire@utdallas.edu

The Developmental Neurolinguistics Lab – Directed by Dr. Mandy Maguire, this lab is focused on understanding how children learn language and how the brain processes language in general. 

Candice Mills, PhD

Professor, School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences
candice.mills@utdallas.edu

The Think Lab – Directed by Dr. Candice Mills, this lab studies how children and adults think about the world around them, including how children and adults decide how much to believe the information they encounter, how they evaluate their own knowledge, and how children determine what someone is likely to know. 

Jackie Nelson, PhD

Associate Professor, School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences
Director of Research, Center for Children and Families
jackie.nelson@utdallas.edu

The Family Research Lab – Directed by Dr. Jackie Nelson, this lab’s goal is to better understand family relationships and children’s well-being, particularly in emotions-emotional expression and regulation, emotion socialization, stress, conflict and closeness. 

Pamela Rollins, EdD

Professor, School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences
rollins@utdallas.edu

Social Communication Lab – Directed by Dr. Pamela Rollins, this lab focuses on understanding and facilitating social communication in infants and children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. 

Melanie Spence, PhD

Associate Dean, Undergraduate Studies
Professor, School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences
mspence@utdallas.edu

The Infant Learning Project – Directed by Dr. Melanie Spence, this lab examines what young infants learn and remember about their earliest experiences, specifically regarding what babies are learning about speech, faces and words, as well as how babies may remember specific experiences. 

Pumpki Lei Su, PhD

Assistant Professor, School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences
lei.su@utdallas.edu

The Language Interaction & Language Acquisition in Children (LILAC) Lab – Directed by Dr. Pumpki Lei Su, this lab conducts observational and experimental studies to understand how various groups of children acquire language, including children with autism spectrum disorder, bilingual children and monolingual children.  

Alva Tang, PhD

Assistant Professor, School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences
alvatang@utdallas.edu

The Laboratory for Healthy Social-Emotional Development – Directed by Dr. Alva Tang, this lab conducts experimental and observational studies to advance knowledge about developmental changes in children’s and adolescents’ social-emotional processes (e.g. neural correlates in processing social information, friendships, health behaviors) that are relevant to mental health across the life course.

Emily Touchstone, PhD

Professor of Instruction, School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences
etouchstone@utdallas.edu

Andrea Warner Czyz, PhD

Associate Professor, School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences
warnerczyz@utdallas.edu

The CHildren and Infant Listening Laboratory (CHILL) – directed by Dr. Andrea Warner-Czyz, this lab explores how infants, children, and adolescents with hearing loss wearing cochlear implants learn to communicate with others, and how communication affects how they feel about themselves.