meet the team

Principal Investigator

SHANA COLE, PhD | Principal Investigator

Shana is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University and director of the Regulation, Action, and Motivated Perception (RAMP) Lab. She received her PhD from New York University before joining the Rutgers faculty in 2014. Shana is interested in the underlying cognitive, perceptual, and affective processes that enable successful goal pursuit. She explores self-regulatory processes across multiple levels of analysis, including higher-order cognition, visual perception, and psychophysiology. Her research spans many goal domains to provide insight into the tools that enable people to mitigate threats, attain rewards, and resist temptations.

Pronouns: she/her | E-mail: shana.cole@rutgers.edu

PhD Students (Advisees)

Clara civiero, ba | PhD Student

Clara is broadly interested in goal-setting and motivation, particularly within organizational contexts. With a background in moral psychology, she explores the application of morality and ethics in decision-making behaviour, including how individuals resist temptations and cope with failure. Her other interests include language and social cognition, health and fitness, and sacrifice during goal pursuit. Clara is passionate about translational and interdisciplinary research.

Pronouns: she/her | E-mail: clara.civiero@rutgers.edu | LinkedIn

Research Coordinator

Julie Abaci, ba

Julie is interested in the impact of marginalization and adversity on well-being. Recently, she has been investigating the motivating factors behind leveraging social and political identification and collective action as forms of coping, and how these experiences can contribute to negative health outcomes in certain contexts. Before joining the lab in 2024, she received her BA in psychology from The College of New Jersey with a minor in philosophy.

Pronouns: she/her | E-mail: julie.abaci@rutgers.edu | Personal Website | CV

Current Undergraduate Independent Project Students

Isabella Pierini

Pronouns: she/her

Isabella is majoring in Psychology and minoring in Sociology. She is an honors thesis student at RAMP Lab studying how social support mediates the effect of disability on students’ pursuit of academic engagement. After graduating, Isabella plans to go to graduate school and pursue a PhD in Social Psychology to continue doing research in the field.

Shannon Carratura
Pronouns: she/her

Shannon is a Psychology and Exercise Science major in the Honors College. As an honors thesis student, she researches how political ideology shapes the way people perceive and interpret sociopolitical information. After graduation, Shannon plans to pursue a Ph.D. in Social Psychology, with the goal of conducting research that addresses pressing sociopolitical issues and contributes to meaningful social change.

Medina kandil

Pronouns: she/her

Medina is a Psychology major with a minor in Biological Sciences. For her honors thesis, she is examining company mission statements with a focus on moral framing. Her broader research interests include motivation, identity, and the integration of psychology within cultural and religious contexts. After graduation, Medina plans to pursue a Master’s in Counseling before working toward a PhD.

PhD Student Alumni

MAGGIE ALBRIGHT-PIERCE, PhD

Maggie is an Associate Professor of Instruction in the Psychology and Neuroscience Department at Temple University, currently teaching Social Psychology, Health Psychology, and Research Methods. With the RAMP lab, her research centers on the self-regulatory strategies people use to handle stress or threat and promote health and wellness.

Pronouns: she/her | Personal Website | CV

HAYLEY SVENSSON, PhD

Hayley is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oklahoma's Health Promotion Research Center (HPRC). She broadly studies goal pursuit, self-regulation, and motivation. More specifically, her main lines of research focus on understanding how people respond to setbacks and obstacles they are likely to experience during goal pursuit. Hayley also studies the antecedents and consequences of goal disengagement (i.e., choosing to no longer pursue a goal), which can result from goal disruption. At the HPRC, she harnesses motivation science to investigate health behaviors and outcomes, like smoking behavior and cessation, and also considers how interpersonal factors shape these processes. With her work, she seeks to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of goal pursuit that considers understudied goal processes and populations.

KYLE BRENNAN, PhD

Broadly, Kyle is interested how people perceptually distort and actively respond to information that threatens their goals or ideological beliefs. In the past, he has focused upon motivated biases, impression formation, and category exemplars. Currently, Kyle is exploring the protective strategies underlying responses to romantic relationship threat and political ideological threat.

Pronouns: he/him | LinkedIn

KRISTINA HOWANSKY, PhD

Kristina is an Associate Professor of Psychology at St. Mary's College of Maryland. Her research explores perceptual and attentional routes to prejudice and discrimination, with an emphasis on bias towards stigmatized populations. She also explores perceptual biases in the way people view themselves.

Pronouns: she/her | Website

JANNA KLINE DOMINICK, PHD

Janna is a Senior UX Researcher at Vanguard. Her research employs motivation science and a user-centered approach to understand how people meet their financial goals. With the RAMP lab, Janna's work explores situational and social factors involved in goal pursuit.

Pronouns: she/her | Website | LinkedIn

PhD Student Alumni (Affiliates)

Grace Wetzel, PhD

Grace is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Sexual Health Promotion in the Indiana University School of Public Health — Bloomington. She studies how gender impacts experiences of sexuality from a feminist psychological perspective. Her main lines of research center around the well-established orgasm gap between cisgender men and women during partnered sex. In collaboration with the RAMP lab, Grace studies the pursuit of orgasm as a goal in sexual encounters.

Pronouns: she/her | Personal Website | CV

MELANIE MAIMON, PhD

Melanie is a tenure-track professor of Psychological Sciences at Bryant University. Her research generally focuses on the experiences and perceptions of sexual and gender minority individuals, intergroup solidarity, and the interplay between stigma and close relationships. Her work so far has examined identity cues, relationships and stigma coping, and stigma management.

Pronouns: she/her | Website

ANALIA ALBUJA, PhD

Analia is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University. Her research studies how multiple identities (e.g., biracial, bicultural identities) are lived and perceived in a society that largely views social categories as distinct and static. Specifically, her research explores: 1) the identity experiences of people who hold multiple identities, and 2) how people who hold multiple (or otherwise stigmatized) identities are perceived by others.

Pronouns: she/her | Website

KIM CHANEY, PhD

Kim is an Assistant Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University at Buffalo. Her research explores how: (1) lay beliefs about prejudice affect marginalized and privileged group members’ performance, behavior, and health, (2) how and when prejudice confrontations reduce prejudice and impact the health of confronters, and (3) how individual and organizational claims of allyship are perceived.

Pronouns: she/her | Website

Undergraduate Alumni

NIMISHA PANT | Former Aresty Student

SHURAFA THOWFEEQ | Former Honors Student

DIANE KIM | Former Aresty Student

JOSHUA SNYDER | Former Research Assistant (currently a Clinical Psychology PhD student at the University of Hartford)

ALICE MOLODAN | Former Cooper Fellow (currently working as a Sales Development Representative at BrightEdge)

DEVIN BARZALLO | Former Honors Student (currently pursuing medical school at Case Western University)

DARLA BONAGURA | Former Honors Student (currently a Social Psychology PhD student at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville)

JOSEPHINE KIM | Former Aresty Fellow (currently a Clinical PhD student at Fairleigh-Dickinson University)

BROOKE SCHLEYER | Former Honors Student, Aresty & Cooper Fellow (currently a Clinical PhD student at Temple University)

SAMUEL KLEIN | Former Aresty & Cooper Fellow (currently a Clinical PhD student at the University of Minnesota)

KELLY LOVE | Former Research Assistant (just graduated from the Masters program in I/O Psychology at Sacred Heart University)

PAMELA GOMEZ | Former Honors Student (currently a PhD student in the Rutgers-Newark Social Psychology Program)

SAMANTHA BRUNO | Former Aresty Student (currently pursuing a double certification in Education at Rutgers University)

THOMAS BUCHENOT | Former Honors Student (currently a Residential Counselor at Carrier Clinic)

ANKITA HUCKOO | Former Rutgers Aresty Fellow (currently working in Human Resources for a luxury retail brand)

MONICA GALASSO | Former Rutgers Aresty Fellow (currently pursuing a Masters in Counseling from The College of New Jersey)

ALESSA NATALE | Former Research Assistant (currently a PhD student in the CUNY I/O Psychology Program)

CAITLYN SMITH | Former Aresty & Cooper Fellow (currently a MS student in the Kean University Occupational Therapy Program)