In early June, 12 undergraduate students from universities and colleges around the country joined Yale Child Study Center (YCSC) as part of an annual, eight-week developmental science summer internship for rising juniors and seniors. The program embeds students in projects ranging from basic and applied science to community-based research projects to clinical settings, incorporating methods including analysis of archived data sets, wet lab techniques, and clinical observations.
YCSC, which serves as the Department of Child Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, offers the internship in partnership with the Department of Pediatrics. Internship placements span all areas of child health, both physical and behavioral. YCSC summer interns are paired with faculty mentors based on their research interests and career trajectories. They spend the summer working with their mentors on relevant research projects and present their projects as conference posters to faculty, staff, and students at the end of the summer.
The 2025 developmental science summer internship poster session will take place on Friday, July 25 from 9 - 11 a.m. Past areas of focus have included the neuroscience of parenting, adolescent risk-taking, family interventions, and addiction. This research-intensive internship is co-directed by Amanda Dettmer, Vince Faustino, Linda Mayes, and Helena Rutherford, with Kathy Ayala as assistant director. Linda Isakson serves as the administrative assistant for the program.
This year’s interns and their respective home institutions are as follows.
- Valentino Cheek, Sewanee: University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn.
- Suzanne Cole, Sewanee: University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn.
- Samuel Grace Conyers, Sewanee: University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn.
- Sreoshi Hossain Adhora, Sewanee: University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn.
- Oleksii Pidlypenets, Sewanee: University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn.
- Amanda Shelton, Sewanee: University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn.
- Dianne Loren Celemen, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, N.C.
- Heidi Du, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa
- Karis Gillen, Grand Valley State University, Allendale, Mich.
- Alexandra Lewis, Northeastern University, Boston, Mass.
- Samuel Muwanka, St. Edwards University, Austin, Texas
- Lucy Yang, Cornell University Ithaca, N.Y.