Team Members

The Kindergarten Readiness Research Program

Megan McClelland, PhD

Principal Investigator

Megan McClelland is the Hallie E.Ford Center for Healthy Children & Families Endowed Director and the Katherine E. Smith Professor of Healthy Children and Families in Human Development and Family Sciences at Oregon State University. Her research focuses on optimizing children's development, especially as it relates to children’s self-regulation and school readiness including links between self-regulation and academic achievement from early childhood to adulthood, recent advances in measuring self-regulation, and intervention efforts to improve these skills in young children.
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Alexis Tracy, MS

Training Manager

Alexis is a training manager at Oregon State University managing the Red Light, Purple Light self-regulation intervention training and implementation and the Early Learning System Initiative (ELSI) training core. Through these two programs, Alexis works to support, enhance, and create high quality and evidence based trainings for the early learning workforce in Oregon and beyond. Her research and training interests include social and emotional development in young children, practical and easy to implement games and activities for early learning settings, and educator well-being.
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Jenny Case, MPH

Research Project Coordinator

As a Research Project Coordinator at Oregon State University, Jenny works on the Red Light, Purple Light project. She earned her Master of Public Health degree in community health education from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Jenny has over 15 years of public health and project management experience with an emphasis on high-risk youth populations, community-wide approaches to prevention, and facilitating groups through complex processes involving research, data collection and analysis, and project planning, implementation, and evaluation. She is interested in learning more about the intersection of adverse childhood experiences and the development of self-regulation skills in children, and their impact on academic success.

Raven Merritt-Shorb, MPH

Research Project Coordinator

Raven is a Research Project Coordinator for the Red Light, Purple Light project at Oregon State University. She earned her Master of Public Health degree in health promotion and health behavior from Oregon State University in 2023. Raven has a background in community outreach and basic needs support and is experienced in project management and evaluation, data management, and community engagement.

Christopher R Gonzales, PhD

Research Associate

Christopher is a Research Associate at Oregon State University working with Kindergarten Readiness Program and is co-lead of the Impact and Evaluation Core in the Early Learning Systems Initiative in the Hallie E Ford Center. He received his PhD in Developmental Psychology from Arizona State University in 2018 and completed postdoctoral fellowships at Oregon State University from 2018-2019, and at the University of California – Davis from 2019 to 2022. Christopher’s research has focused on aspects of children’s social and cognitive development, school readiness, psychometric analyses and measurement.

Kendall Simmons

Education Project Assistant

Prior to joining the RLPL team, Kendall worked in elementary education as a Bilingual Spanish speaking Behavior Support Specialist. Kendall earned bachelors degrees in Public Health and Spanish from Central Washington University and is a current Graduate Student at the School of Social Work at Portland State University. She is excited to contribute to ongoing research that supports self-regulation intervention strategies for all preschool students.

Current Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Scholars

Amara Bradetich

Graduate Research Assistant

Amara graduated from the University of North Texas with a Master's degree in Educational Psychology, specializing in Human Development and Learning, in 2018 and worked for two years with Early Childhood Intervention in Texas before beginning the PhD program in Human Development and Family Sciences at OSU. Her research interests center around child self-regulation and how the environment, specifically the prenatal and parental environments, affect a child's development of self-regulation. Specifically, she is interested in how maternal experiences during pregnancy affect child self-regulation in early childhood and how the parenting relationship and parenting skills used in early childhood impact children's regulation of emotions, behaviors, and cognitions. Amara is also interested in family policy and the translation of research in helping families better support their children's development. She looks forward to graduating from OSU with her PhD in 2024 and pursuing applied research positions in early childhood.

Paige Braithwaite

Graduate Research Assistant

Paige graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2021 with a B.A. in Human Development and Family Studies and worked as a research assistant at the UNC Brain and Early Experience (BEE) Lab during her senior year. Paige's research interests center around examining the factors that affect metacognition, self-regulation, and motivation in early childhood. More specifically, she is interested in examining the specific factors that shape the malleability of development in early childhood. Paige looks forward to applying her research interests as she begins working on her master's thesis at OSU in the Fall of 2022.

Xinfang Si, MS

Graduate Research Assistant

Xinfang Si graduated in Human Development and Family Studies from Colorado State University with a major in Prevention Science. Before that, she had earned an M.A. in Development Psychology in China. Her research goal is to optimize the development of children during early childhood. She is interested in promoting children’s self-regulation (e.g., executive function) and school readiness (e.g., social-emotional competencies and academic outcomes). She is also interested in the combined impacts of individual characteristics and parent-child interactions on the development of children in a disadvantaged environment (e.g., socioeconomic status, divorce, neighborhood, etc.). Specifically, she is interested in the translation of research into intervention/prevention programs, as well as how to promote children’s self-regulation and school readiness through them.

Nasrin Zamani Foroushani

Graduate Research Assistant

Nasrin Zamani is a PhD student in the Human Development and Family Sciences program. She completed her master in clinical psychology at the University of Tehran. Her research is focused on the effectiveness of cognitive, emotional and social intervention on improvement of executive functions and self-regulation in children with behavioral problems. Nasrin has a strong background and experience in assessing and enhancing cognitive abilities, especially executive function in children. Her clinical experience and research interest is in using different methods such as cognitive and behavioral interventions to improve emotional and cognitive performance with a particular focus on self-regulation in children with developmental problems such as learning disorders and ADHD in behavioral level and brain function.