Current CBD Trainees
Post-Doctoral Scholars
(List of pre-doctoral students)
Julia Eksner is a cultural psychologist/ psychological anthropologist, working at the intersection of culture and adolescent development. Her research is concerned with how the immigrant minority experience impacts the development of selfhood and self-regulation among immigrant and minority youth in Germany and the United States. Julia was trained as a learning scientist and as a sociocultural anthropologist, thus connecting socio-cultural and cognitive-developmental perspectives in the study of adolescence. She is interested in how the relationship between social, political, and discursive contexts and cultural beliefs and practices takes shaping force on immigrant adolescents’ development. Her current work as Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Culture, Brain and Development at UCLA centers on how the experiences of adolescents of Turkish and Palestinian descent in Germany are (re-) appropriated in the emergence of a distinctive set of life course models, notions of selfhood, and affective experiences and practices. In this effort she is using mixed methodology including participant observation and interviews, experience sampling method, survey instrumentation, cultural consensus modeling, and biophysiological markers of stress. Julia works with Tom Weisner (Center for Culture & Health), Jason Throop (Anthropology), Emeran Mayer (Center for Neurovisceral Sciences), and Marjorie Orellana (Education).
Kek Khee Loo is a developmental-behavioral pediatrician and assistant clinical professor of pediatrics at David Geffen School of Medicine. His research focuses on how the pressure from families on the mother to conform to societal standards and traditional cultural beliefs may affect maternal, fetal and child well being. He is a recipient of a career development award (K08) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The thrust of the research is on maternal stress and gender preference, in the context of the ‘one-child policy’ in China. The study has two main goals. The first is to examine whether familial expectation to have a male child in China fosters higher levels of maternal psychological distress during pregnancy, thereby generating effects mediated through maternal physiological alterations on the developing fetus. The second is to determine whether maternal anxiety over the gender of the fetus, with postnatal modulation of anxiety depending on the gender of the child, may be associated with the quality of mother-son and mother-daughter interaction. Kek Khee works with Dan Siegel (Psychiatry) and Tom Weisner (Center for Culture and Health).
