Meet our team

Xinyi Chen is a doctoral student in the developmental psychology area. She received her B.A. in Psychology and Economics from UC Berkeley in 2020. She completed her honors thesis on the relations among neighborhood disadvantage, cumulative risk, and self-regulation in Chinese immigrant children under Dr. Zhou’s mentorship. She is particularly interested in what and how contextual and cultural factors play a role in affecting children’s self-regulation outcomes, and the potential implications they have for interventions. In her free time, she enjoys listening to music, martial arts, and road trips.
Email: xichen320@berkeley.edu

Christopher Gys is a doctoral student in the clinical science area. He received a B.A. in Hispanic Studies from Bowdoin College. For the next two years, he worked as an Assistant Language Teacher in the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program in Hakusan, Ishikawa. Chris is interested in the influence of culture and language on socio-emotional development and hopes research findings in this area can improve the efficacy of mental health services for bilingual and bicultural communities in the U.S. In his free time, Chris likes playing soccer, haunting local cafes, and listening to the On Being podcast.
Email: cgys@berkeley.edu

Ziling Huang is a first-year Developmental Psychology PhD student. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Berkeley in 2024, with a minor in Education. She joined Family and Culture Lab as a research assistant in her sophomore year, and then proceeded to work as a project coordinator after graduation. Her main research interests focus on how parental language attitudes and literacy practices contribute to bilingual children’s early language development, especially the influence of digital media as both a source of language input and a platform for children to exercise their existing language skills. In her free time, she enjoys crocheting, playing games, singing, and reading mystery novels.
Email: zilingh919@berkeley.edu

Erika Roach (she/her) is a doctoral student in the clinical science area. She received both her B.A. in Psychology and Human Biology and her M.A. in Psychology from Stanford University. Erika’s research interests lie at the intersection of racial and cultural identity, early life stress, emotion regulation, and developmental psychopathology. Outside of research, she enjoys dancing, hitting the driving range, museum-hopping, practicing Buddhism, and baking oatmeal chocolate chip cookies for family and friends.
Email: erika.ro@berkeley.edu

Chun-Chi (Sarah) Yang is a former high school teacher for 20 years in Taiwan, is a graduate student of School Psychology PhD program in School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. From her teaching experience, she became interested in how emotional disorders, particularly depression, develop and manifest in childhood and adolescence. She is focused on investigating how factors of sleep, culture and technology impact the regulation of emotions and emotional disorders in adolescent girls. She is committed to promoting adolescent well-being in school settings.
Email: youngsarah00@berkeley.edu