Professional Bio

Cassandra is a first-year graduate student in the Child-Track Clinical Psychology doctoral program at Penn State. Her advisor is Dr. Katie Burkhouse. Cassandra graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2021 with a B.S. in Neuroscience and Behavior and a second major in Italian. During her time at Notre Dame, she volunteered as a research assistant in Dr. Laura Miller-Graff’s lab. After graduating, she worked as a Sara S. Sparrow Fellow in Clinical Neuroscience in Dr. James McPartland’s lab at the Yale Child Study Center from 2021-2023 and as the lab manager of Dr. Laurel Gabard-Durnam's lab at Northeastern University from 2023-2025. Cassandra is interested in investigating how caregiver-child relationships in early life influence children’s neural and socioemotional development over time and how preventive caregiver-child interventions can help reduce the intergenerational transmission of internalizing disorders.