Meet Our Team & Collaborators

Sarah Weinsztok (she/her) completed her Ph.D. in psychology with a concentration in behavior analysis from the University of Florida. Dr. Weinsztok adopts a reinforcer pathology approach to understanding maladaptive behavior patterns. Her research to-date has included implementing behavioral economic methods to assess and treat problem behavior and unhealthy eating habits among children with autism. Recently, she has employed temporal and probability discounting frameworks to understand how the overvaluation of immediate or guaranteed reinforcers may impact health protective behaviors amidst a global pandemic. Dr. Weinsztok's current interest focuses on expanding her use of behavioral economic frameworks to the area of addictive disorders.

  Stefanie completed her bachelor’s degree at Central Michigan University in 2011, where she spent two years in the basic experimental animal laboratory assisting graduate students with experiments looking at impulsive behavior and flash rate discrimination in rats and pigeons. Following completion of my degree, she went to the University of North Texas for a master’s degree in behavior analysis, where she mainly studied stimulus equivalence in pigeons and humans. She went home to my parents’ house in Colorado Springs after graduation where she worked with kids with developmental disabilities before coming to the University of Kansas to pursue a doctorate degree in Behavioral Psychology. Stephanie is entering her fifth year as a doctoral student in the Department of Applied Behavioral Science, where she has mainly been studying delay and probability discounting with substance and alcohol use with college students. Currently, she has a fellowship with the Army at Fort Leavenworth, where she assists research psychologists with their research focusing on leader development in the Army. 

Brandon is a graduate student in the Applied Behavioral Science doctoral program at the University of Kansas. He earned his Master's in Clinical Behavioral Psychology at Eastern Michigan University, where his research focused on non-medical prescription stimulant use among undergraduate students and contingency management for opioid use. After earning his M.S., he conducted neuropsychological assessments on individuals with cognitive loss at an outpatient clinic in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Herry is a doctoral candidate in the Neuroscience Graduate Program at McMaster University (previously supervised by Dr. Amlung). Herry's Master's Thesis research focused on studying Episodic Future Thinking and its effects on delay discounting and alcohol demand among individuals with addictive disorders. For his dissertation research, he is working with Dr. Margaret McKinnon at McMaster. He is investigating the intersection between simple vs. complex trauma, dissociation, and substance use.

Emma Marsden is a graduate student in the Neuroscience Graduate Program at McMaster University (supervised by Dr. James MacKillop).  Emma is the project coordinator of the our lab's RES-CUE fMRI study being conducted at McMaster. Before starting graduate school, Emma was a full-time Research Assistant in our lab where she was project coordinator of multiple studies (traumatic brain injury in concurrent disorders; contingency management for smoking cessation in schizophrenia)

Tegan is a graduate student in the Neuroscience Graduate Program at McMaster University (supervised by Dr. James MacKillop) in the Peter Boris Centre. Tegan is currently working on  the  RES-CUE study in the lab.  She completed her MSc in neuroscience from Queen’s University in 2019 studying the neural correlates of working memory in major depressive disorder. Tegan’s main role in the Peter Boris Centre is as a neuroimager, working on both structural and functional MRI.