Assistant Professor
Cara Tomaso, Ph.D, is the postdoctoral Pediatric Psychology Fellow at the Yale Child Study Center. She received her B.A. from Smith College, where she majored in psychology and applied statistics. As a graduate student in UNL’s Pediatric Health Lab, her research and clinical interests focused on executive function and the role of cognitive development in shaping children’s physical and mental health outcomes. Her Master’s thesis investigated how preschool sleep problems affect executive function development in childhood. She also received an NRSA Fellowship from NIH to fund her dissertation, which used neuroimaging to examine adolescents’ executive function abilities as correlates of activity in regulatory- and reward-regions of the brain while viewing food images. Clinically, she has worked in a variety of medical and community-based settings. She most enjoys working with children and families as they adjust to challenging medical diagnoses and collaborating with interdisciplinary care teams to optimize children’s medical care.