Our Team
Project Director
Rachel Barr, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
I was trained as a developmental and clinical psychologist in New Zealand. Since 2001 I have been director of the Georgetown Early Learning Project. We have shown that babies, toddlers and young children pick up information from a variety of sources, from television, from books, from computers, from touchscreens, from siblings, and across contexts. There are still many open questions about how babies and young children learn and remember. Psychology Department webpage.
Lab Manager
Amanda Grenell
Amanda Grenell graduated from the University of Virginia in 2012 with a BA in Psychology and Spanish. She enjoyed being a research assistant in the Child Study Center at the University of Virginia and is glad she will get the opportunity to continue to work with children and to gain additional research experience. In the future, Amanda hopes to attend graduate school to study Developmental Psychology or Public Health. She is particularly interested in how children learn from different types of media and how research can be used to better public policy and the health of others.
Graduate Students
Natalie Brito
Natalie Brito is a fifth year student in the Human Development and Public Policy Concentration. She is currently involved in a project that uses media to increase the quality and quantity of interactions between children and their incarcerated teen parents. Additionally, she is working on different studies looking at long-term memory from books and television and how to best present information in children's media in order to optimize learning and retention. Her dissertation will examine cognitive flexibility in bilingual infants and toddlers. Natalie received her BA in Psychology from the University of Virginia in 2005 and her M.A. in Experimental Psychology from the College of William and Mary in 2008. When she is not working with in the lab, Natalie enjoys running, yoga, watching sports and volunteering for the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
Laura Zimmermann
Laura Zimmermann is a second year student with a concentration in Human Development and Public Policy. Through the Georgetown Early Learning Project she is investigating the role that media sources play in infants' learning and memory processes. She is currently involved in a project at the National Zoo examining imitation mechanisms and working memory in toddlers. Additionally, she is involved in a touchscreen study looking at infants' ability transfer learning across dimensions and the effect of context in this process. Laura received her BA in Psychology, with a minor in American Sign Language, from the University of Rochester in 2011. She has previously worked at the University of Rochester's Baby Lab and was an intern at the Laboratory for Developmental Studies at Harvard University.Research Assistants
Marisa Morin
Marisa Morin is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences double majoring in Psychology and English and minoring in Education, Inquiry, and Justice. She is currently working on her senior Psychology honors theses project, "Father-infant interactions following the 'Baby Elmo' Intervention." She will examine parent-child interactions in children 2- to 12-months in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the Baby Elmo intervention on quality interactions between incarcerated teen parents and their very young babies across program sessions. In addition to working with the ELP, Marisa serves as President of GU Children's Theater, a co-curricular theater group focused on sharing the dramatic arts with children of the DC area. After Georgetown, she hopes to continue her studies in a combined doctoral program in education and Psychology.
Ceecee Yao
Ceecee is a senior in the college with a double major in government and psychology. She has been working at ELP since her sophomore year. She is currently working on a honors thesis on context effects and imitation learning.
Lovika Kalra
Lovika Kalra is a senior in the College as a Psychology major and pre-dental student. She joined the ELP lab in January 2012 because of her love for kids and interest in child development and cognition. As a bilingual, she loves working on ELP's bilingual studies to help determine the differences between monolingual and bilingual children. Along with working in the ELP, she is on the board for the Hindu Students Association and choreographs Bollywood dance for Rangila. She was also a commitee member for Relay for Life. Lovika is excited to gain experience working with children and hopes to apply these skills to her future career as a pediatric dentist.
Laura Golojuch
Laura Golojuch is a senior in the College with a major in Psychology and double minor in English and Studio Art. She has had extensive experience working with young children and is excited to continue this through the Early Learning Project. She hopes to continue on to pursue a degree in Marriage and Family Therapy or Clinical Psychology. Laura is currently working on a GW Georgetown collaboration study which looks at the performance of young children on a series of imitation tasks at the National Zoo.
Neydyn Gomez
Neydyn Gomez is a senior in the College. Although she is pursuing a Government major and an Anthropology minor, she always had an interest in psychology and interacting with children. She aspires to go to law school and possibly study law related to community development and its benefits/effects on younger generations, especially Hispanic communities. Neydyn has been working closely with Project FLIP and Baby Elmo.
Suzanne Beinfield
Suzanne Beinfield is a senior in the College. She is a Psychology major with a double minor in Business Administration and Chinese. Suzanne chose to work in the Early Learning Project because of the focus on child development which is the field, along with neuropsychology, that she is most interested in pursuing as a career. This is her first semester in the Early Learning Project and is currently working on project FLIP data analysis.
Jake Langbein
Jake Langbein is a senior in Georgetown College and is majoring in Psychology and Spanish. Pursuant to his interests in languages and cognition, he joined the ELP last year and worked on coding data to examine executive functioning in bilingual infants. Jake is also a member of the Zoo Team, which visits the Smithsonian National Zoo to collect data on the cognitive architecture of social learning during early childhood. Jake enjoys the time that he spent in the lab working with children, learning and teaching coding, and learning about research methodology. In the future, Jake hopes to incorporate the knowledge from his experience at ELP into his career, where he plans to work in a human resources capacity to study organizational culture and optimizing its efficiency.
Chagai Mendelson
Chagai Mendelson is a junior at the Georgetown College, majoring in Biology and Pre-Med. Through his work in the Early Learning Project he hopes to further his research interest in the ways children learn in general and specifically how growing up in a bilingual environment effects learning patterns. Chagai hopes that his experience in the lab will be especially relevant to his future career working with children.
Herietta Lee
Herietta Lee is a junior in the College majoring in Psychology and possibly minoring in Biology and Theology. She loves working with children and has always been interested in early child development. She is currently pre-health and hopes to pursue a career in the health field working with children. This is her first semester working at the lab as a part of the Magnet study.
Qianjia (Jiajia) Jiang
Jiajia Jiang is currently a Pre-Med sophomore in the NHS studying Healthcare Management and Policy. She joined the Early Learning Project in early 2012 after being intrigued in the cognitive development of infants, and is currently working on the Cognitive Flexibility Study. Aside from the Early Learning Project, Jiajia is also involved on campus as a Residential Assistant for a freshman dorm and on the Asian American Student Association board.
