Alexander S. Hatoum, PhD, joins the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences as a research assistant professor. Hatoum studies the causes of psychiatric disorders for predicting and classifying individuals. This includes analysis of large-scale medical data sets and integration across many different fields using biostatistics and machine learning. His current focus is on substance use disorders and substance co-diagnosis of other psychiatric conditions. Hatoum earned his doctorate from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and since 2019 has been a postdoctoral researcher at Washington University.
Seanna Leath, PhD, joins the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences as an assistant professor. Her research uses interdisciplinary approaches in education and psychology to understand and address issues related to the holistic development of Black women and girls in the context of families, schools, and communities. Specifically, her work focuses on how individual and contextual factors promote Black women and girls’ academic achievement and psychological wellbeing. She earned her doctorate from the University of Michigan and taught at the University of Virginia before coming to WashU.
Jessie Sun, PhD, joins the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences as an assistant professor. Sun earned her doctorate from the University of California, Davis. Her research aims to understand how people can balance the pursuit of personal well-being with broader moral concerns. Sun’s main lines of research include examining which kinds of social interactions matter for well-being, studying the causes and consequences of moral improvement, and investigating the psychological connections and tradeoffs between well-being and morality. She uses a range of naturalistic methods to study people in the real-world contexts, including experience sampling, audio recordings of people’s everyday conversations, informant reports, and daily life interventions.
Emily Willroth, PhD, joins the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences as an assistant professor. Willroth’s current research examines how different components of well-being, such as emotion, life satisfaction, and sense of purpose vary and change across time, both in the short-term from moment-to-moment and in the long-term across the adult lifespan. She applies insights from this research to examine links between well-being and important health outcomes in middle and older adulthood, such as chronic illness, mortality, and dementia risk. She earned her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley.
