Lab Members

Dr. Margaret (Megan) Fields-Olivieri | Pronouns: She/Her

Megan is an Assistant Professor who joined the UNCG Clinical Psychology faculty in 2021. She earned her B.A. in Psychology from Duke University and her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology with a specialization in child clinical psychology from Penn State University. She completed her predoctoral internship and postdoctoral fellowship at the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center School of Medicine, where she received specialized training in infant and early childhood mental health. Megan’s research focuses on the intersection of emotional and verbal development in early childhood, particularly the role that toddlers’ emotions play in parent-child communication. She is especially interested in leveraging novel technologies to sample everyday parent-child communication and emotion socialization processes in ecologically valid ways. In her spare time, Megan loves spending time with her family, eating good food, listening to podcasts and spending time outside.

Brianna Halter | Pronouns: She/Her

Brianna is a first-year doctoral student in the Clinical Psychology program at UNC Greensboro (Fall 2022 Cohort). She received her B.S. in Psychology at Washington State University in 2020, where she continued to work as a post baccalaureate in an Infant Temperament Lab and Adolescent Personality and Social Media Lab until Fall 2022. She is interested in exploring parent-toddler interactions and their impact on emotion regulation and language development, with a particular interest in understanding the risk and protective factors that may interplay within said interactions. In her free time, Brianna enjoys venturing outdoors, practicing yoga, and taking aimless night drives while listening to good tunes.

Ei (Crystal) Thinzar | Pronouns: She/Her

Crystal is an international student from Myanmar and a second-year doctoral student in the Clinical Psychology Program at UNC Greensboro (Fall 2021 Cohort). She received her B.S. in Psychology with Disciplinary Honors from UNC Greensboro in May 2020. Upon graduation and before entering the clinical doctoral program, she worked closely with Dr. Margaret Sheridan as a full-time lab manager in the CIRCLE Lab at UNC Chapel Hill. Broadly, she is interested in identifying developmental pathways to psychopathology within family, psychosocial and sociocultural contexts with a focus on moment-to-moment parenting and the role of language in emotion regulation. Professionally, she is passionate about mentoring and raising mental health awareness in the Asian community. In her free time, she enjoys traveling, watching TV shows and exploring different kinds of spicy food.

Kristin Jennings | Pronouns: She/Her

Kristin is a first-year doctoral student in the Clinical Psychology Program at UNC Greensboro (Fall 2022 Cohort). She earned her B.S. in Psychology from the University of North Florida and her M.S. in Psychology from Villanova University. As a Master’s student, she worked with Dr. Janette Herbers studying developmental processes of risk and resilience in children experiencing family homelessness. Prior to entering doctoral training, Kristin worked as a home visitor through the Healthy Families Arizona program in Tucson. Currently, she is interested in studying parent-toddler communication to capture the dynamic, dyadic processes involved in language and emotion regulation development. She is also interested in how individual factors, such as parent emotion socialization goals and child temperament, may influence these processes. In her free time, Kristin enjoys being in nature, doing yoga, or watching a good limited series.