RISE Lab members
Maha Alqous
Maha is a third-year student, majoring in Educational Psychology. Her research interests encompass stereotype threat, and its potential impact on the advancement of women in academia at university institutions in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Denzell Brown
Denzell Brown (he/him/his), is a Washington DC native and alumni of Georgetown University. He is currently a doctoral student in Counseling Psychology at Howard University. His research focuses on post-traumatic growth outcomes, restorative oriented coping mechanisms, and grief resolution methods that Black parents use to heal after losing a child to gun violence. In 2021, he founded the Brave Behind the Bullet Initiative which aims to bring together Black parents in DC and Baltimore who have lost a child to gun violence, understand their lived experiences, and connects them with opportunities for reconciliation and empowerment via free mental health services and judicial hearings to deliver testimonies to council members and politicians.
Darryl Diptee
Darryl is a PhD student at University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education, whose research investigates how underrepresented students in STEM might better negotiate their academic excellence within oppressive social systems. His work suggests that many promising students who would otherwise excel, remove themselves from STEM fields not because of their lack of intellectual ability, but due to unpleasant physiological responses they experience while engaging in STEM. He presents undesirable somatic markers such as a tightening of the throat, a pounding heartbeat or sweaty palms as renderings of embodied cognition. He is designing a body-based intervention to mitigate such negative bodily effects over time, allowing students to form new, healthy relationships with STEM.
Jerriel Hall - Research Assistant
Jerriel Hall is a doctoral student at Howard University in the educational psychology program. He has a Master of Education in Curriculum & Instruction from the University of Southern California. Jerriel has over a decade of experience teaching locally and abroad. In 2018, Hall was awarded a Fulbright Distinguished Award in Teaching grant in Ghana to research improving STEM teacher effectiveness and self-efficacy through differentiated professional development. Jerriel's primary research interest is reducing the psychological and emotional effects of stereotype threat for middle school African-American males within inclusion classrooms with an identified specific learning disability. He also has research interests in psychological and cognitive factors that enable learners to acquire, use, and understand language in K-12 ESL classrooms.
Nicole Johnson
Nicole Johnson is a PhD student at Howard University in the Higher Education Leadership & Policy Studies program. Nicole also obtained a Master degree from Harvard Graduate School of Education. She currently works as a junior analyst for Impact Analytics, serves as managing editor for the Journal of African American Males in Education, and was recently elected as Chair-Elect to the American Educational Research Association's graduate student council. Prior to joining Impact Analytics, Nicole worked as a Research Assistant at Harvard Graduate School of Education. She collaborated on a longitudinal study following high school students and how their sense of purpose and views of the economy affect their decision making when transitioning from secondary to post-secondary institutions. Additionally, she worked at the Education Redesign Lab, under the guidance of former MA Secretary of Education, to plan and execute a convening of Mayors, Superintendents, and Community Leaders to improve the prospects of Black and Brown youth excelling academically.
Tenisha Jones- Lab Manager
Tenisha Jones, M.Ed is a third year doctoral student in School Psychology at Howard University. Prior to attending Howard, she obtained a Masters of Educational Policy & Leadership from the University of Michigan. Her primary research interests include the mental health, well-being and education of Black Girls. while her current research projects addresses issues of diversity embedded in the practice of school psychology under the direction of Dr. Celeste Malone. Additionally, she ha research experience investigating Youth Participatory Action Research Programs in Michigan and Preschool Quality Assessments at the High Scope Educational Research Foundation. In tandem with her research, she has also given national conference presentations and trainings on her work. Tenisha has extensive professional experiences in education ranging from a Middle School Behavioral Interventionist, High School Director of College & Career to Collegiate level Success Coach.
Najma Knobloch
Najma Knobloch is a Frederick Douglass Fellow and doctoral student in the Educational Psychology program at Howard University. She holds a master’s degree in Education and Human Development from George Washington University and a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from University of Maryland, College Park. Najma’s research interests center around approaches to teacher education and development, school climate, and students’ social and emotional well-being, particularly the impacts of trauma-informed education for students and trauma-informed training for teachers.
Marcela Valencia Serrano
Marcela is a PhD Candidate at Pontificia Universidad javeriana Cali, Colombia in the Psychology Doctoral Program. Marcela also obtained a Master degree in Education from ICESI University in Cali. She works as a teacher in the Social Science Department at Javeriana University. She teaches developmental psychology, research methods in psychology and motivation process in education. Her research interest in the PhD is focused on understand the self-regulated learning process in college students and its relation to teacher feedback process. She is also interested and has worked in research about metacognition in reading and writing; self-regulation of motivation in engineering students and teacher-students interaction in elementary and highs school students. About this, she is certified in the Classroom Assesment Scoryng System (CLASS, Pianta, Hamre & Mintz, 2008), which allowed her to observe and analyze teacher-student interaction in four domains: emotional support, classroom organization, pedagogical support, and student behavioral engagement.
RISE Lab Alumni
Marie Plaisime, PhD
Degree: PhD in Medical Sociology, Howard University (2021). Current Position: Postdoctoral Researcher- Harvard University Overview: At Harvard University, Dr. Plaisime will continue her research implicit bias in physicians and residents in healthcare, and its impact on inter-racial patient interactions. She will also support similar research in the aforementioned areas.
Brielle Brookins, PhD
Degree: PhD in Social Psychology, Howard University (2020) Current Position: Postdoctoral Fellow- Washington D.C. Public School District Overview: Dr. Brookins is leading the charge in developing additional professional development options for K-12 teachers in schools that are a part of an improvement plan designed by the District.
Deyonna Grant
Deyonna is a doctoral student in the department of Psychology at Howard University where she majors in Developmental Psychology. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Temple University, Pennsylvania. Grant’s research focuses on the experiences, attitudes, and processes that contribute to the mental withdrawal of marginalized students from academic settings. In particular, Grant ‘s line of research centers on academic engagement, disaffection, disengagement, disidentification, and teacher-student relationship quality amongst minoritized students.
Dantavious Hicks
Dantavious has Master’s degree in Counseling and Human Johns Hopkins University’s Program. Hicks’s research focuses on counselors’ ability to broach or discuss the contextual dimensions of race, ethnicity, and culture during the counseling process. His other research interests include multicultural orientation, social justice, anti-racism in counselor education, and identity development.
