Graduate Student
Clinical Psychology

Elena is a second-year graduate student in the Clinical Psychology Ph.D. program at UCLA. She received her B.S. in Clinical/Community Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2020. Elena then spent two years as a research assistant for the Pittsburgh Girls Study at the University of Pittsburgh, working for Drs Alison Hipwell and Kate Keenan. There, she worked with young children and their mothers, examining the effects of preconception stress exposure on pregnancy health and child neurodevelopment. Elena’s current research interests include elucidating how children’s physiological, emotional, and behavioral functioning influences the trajectories of their mental health. She is also interested in identifying neighborhood- and family-level protective factors within these mechanisms to help inform community-based interventions.