Courtenay Kessler was a doctoral student in human development and social policy. She previously completed her master’s degree at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health in the department of society, human development, and health. She worked as an academic evaluator of a wide range of public health programs, including early childhood development and infant mortality interventions. Courtenay’s research interests focus on the social determinants of health and multi-generational interventions to improve health and educational outcomes. She is also interested in community-based methodologies and mixed methods.
Heather McCambly was a doctoral student in Human Development and Social Policy. She looks broadly the effects of ideology on decision-making processes relevant to issues of race and inequality. In the context of the COAST lab, Heather works as part of the BIO Study team as an intervention facilitator and conducting multi-method analysis on the interactions between school contexts and the BIO Study intervention.
Lynn Meissner was a doctoral student in Human Development and Social Policy and a graduate research fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. Her research is focused on the transition from high school to postsecondary education and the workforce, especially the role of Career and Technical Education in high school and mid-skill career preparation in community colleges. She is also interested in program and policy implementation and evaluation and strengthening channels of communication between researchers and non-researchers. Lynn grew up in Yonkers, NY, got her BA in Psychology from UC-Santa Cruz, and served as an AmeriCorps VISTA in Kansas City, MO before starting at Northwestern.
Emily Hittner was a graduate of the Human Development and Social Policy program in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. She was a graduate fellow in the Multidisciplinary Program for Education Sciences (MPES), the Society Biology and Health graduate cluster, and the Teaching Certificate Program at the Searle Center for Advancing Learning & Teaching. Her advisors were Drs. Emma Adam and Claudia Haase. Her research interests include links between stress biology, chronic stress, emotion functioning, and health. She examines how social contexts related to chronic stress shape stress biology and long-term health outcomes. She also studies the mediating role of emotion regulation strategies for stress and health and social factors that promote (or inhibit) the efficacy of emotion regulation for health outcomes.
Emily Collins Ross is a graduate of the Human Development and Social Policy program and was graduate research fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. Her program of research focused on understanding the relationships between poverty, family functioning, preschool quality, and early childhood development among children growing up in economically disadvantaged communities. She seeks to apply this research to the development, implementation, and evaluation of programs and policies that reduce socioeconomic disparities and promote healthy development of at-risk children. Her current research explores how gains in low-income parents’ education after starting a family relates to parents’ stress and well-being, the quality of the home environment, and children’s academic outcomes, as well as how these relationships may vary based on children’s experiences in Head Start preschool.
Jennifer Cowhy was a doctoral Student and is interested in researching how schools can better serve students who have experienced adverse childhood experiences and students with IEPs. Jen worked at the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research for six years prior to beginning her studies at Northwestern and received her Masters in public policy and Masters in social work from the University of Chicago and her AB in sociology from the University of Michigan.