Postdoctoral Fellows

Xihan Yang is a Postdoctoral Fellow. She received her Ph.D. in Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University and specializes in culturally responsive and sexuality-informed autism research.

Dr. Yang’s research examines how neurodiversity and sociocultural contexts intersect to shape the development, social communication, relationships, and well-being of autistic youth and their families. She is particularly interested in improving our understanding of autistic individuals from historically understudied communities and across diverse developmental experiences, including those related to gender, language, and socioeconomic contexts. She has extensive experience in measure development, project management, and advancing community engagement in research.

Inspired by research at NDL, Dr. Yang is excited to expand her expertise in pragmatic language assessment and the broad autism phenotype to better understand the mechanisms underlying social communication among autistic youth and their family systems. She intends to understand how individual, psychosocial, and cultural factors contribute to variations in pragmatic language profiles among autistic individuals and their families to inform the development of culturally responsive assessment tools and family-centered pragmatic language interventions.

Xuan Wang is a Postdoctoral Fellow. He brings an interdisciplinary background in linguistics, communication sciences, and computer science to his work in the lab.

Dr. Xuan Wang’s research employs behavioral, electroencephalography (EEG/ERP), and computational methods to investigate the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying language development, processing, and communication in diverse populations, including typically and atypically developing children and second language learners. His research has been presented at leading conferences, including the Neurobiology of Language Annual Meeting, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Annual Meeting, the Cognitive Science Society Annual Meeting, the Society for Research in Child Development Biennial Meeting, and the Boston University Conference on Language Development.

Prior to joining NDL, Xuan received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Kansas. He also received research training in Communication Sciences and Disorders at Syracuse University and training in Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. At NDL, Xuan is excited to continue his research to pragmatic language and social communication in autism spectrum disorder and the broader autism phenotype, with a particular interest in cross-linguistic comparisons between English- and Mandarin-speaking autistic individuals. His long-term goal is to integrate experimental, computational, and data-driven approaches to better understand language development and to inform evidence-based assessment and intervention for neurodevelopmental populations.

Graduate Students

Mitra Kumareswaran is a doctoral student in the Clinical Psychology Ph.D. Program at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Her clinical emphasis is in Child and Adolescent Psychology, and Pediatric Neuropsychology. Mitra is specifically interested in working with children with neurodevelopmental disabilities including autism and/or intellectual disability.

Mitra has been working with children with neurodevelopmental disabilities for the past ten years in both research and therapeutic settings. During her undergraduate career at the University of Georgia, Mitra worked as a research assistant at the UGA Clinical and Cognitive Neurosciences Lab and the UGA Child Autism and Attention Research/Evaluation Lab. Prior to joining the NDL, she completed a pre-doctoral research fellowship in Speech Science and Engineering at the Marcus Autism Center in collaboration with Emory University and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.

Mitra is aiming towards a career as a pediatric neuropsychologist in an academic center. She intends to combine her love for clinical practice with scientific inquiry.

Mitra earned her B.S. in Biology (with an emphasis in neuroscience) and B.A. in English at the University of Georgia, and her M.S. in Clinical Psychology at Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine.

Sarah Ethridge is a doctoral student in Clinical Psychology, and is specializing in Child and Adolescent Psychology and Neuropsychology.

Prior to joining the NDL, Sarah worked with individuals with neurodevelopmental conditions for many years. Her interest in neurodevelopmental research stems from both her work as a Youth Ambassador for Tourette syndrome and her education in neuroscience at Davidson College. Most recently, Sarah worked as a Postbaccalaureate IRTA at the National Institute of Mental Health, contributing to research projects investigating the behavioral phenotypes of rare genetic conditions associated with autism and intellectual disability (ID), such as fragile X syndrome.

Through this work, Sarah has developed interests in the etiology, assessment, and evidence-based treatment of social communication deficits associated with neurodevelopmental conditions. Currently, she contributes to research efforts assessing prosody and characterizing prosodic profiles associated with social communication deficits in individuals with autism and fragile X syndrome.

Sarah hopes to gain training in clinical child psychology and developmental neuropsychology. Long-term, her goals include working in an academic healthcare system developing and validating assessment instruments measuring social communication in individuals with ID, who constitute an under-researched clinical cohort.

Maureen is a doctoral student in Clinical Psychology, specializing in Child and Adolescent Psychology and Neuropsychology.

Maureen has worked with the autistic community for many years, both in research and clinical settings. During her undergraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she worked as a research assistant at the Waisman Center’s Child Emotion Research Lab. Prior to joining the NDL, she completed a post-baccalaureate research fellowship at the Yale Child Study Center’s Social and Affective Neuroscience of Autism Laboratory. She then worked with the NDL as a research coordinator before beginning her graduate studies.

Maureen is interested in understanding the neurocognitive and psycholinguistic mechanisms that underly complex language differences in autistic individuals, their family members, and individual with related developmental disabilities.

Maureen hopes to build a career as a pediatric neuropsychologist at an academic medical center, where she can make meaningful contributions to research while simultaneously serving families through clinical practice.

Maureen earned her B.A. in psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Dante Rogers is a doctoral student in Clinical Psychology, specializing in Child and Adolescent Psychology and Neuropsychology.

Over the past four years, Dante has gained extensive experience working with pediatric populations affected by a variety of neurodevelopmental and rare genetic disorders. During his undergraduate studies at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, he engaged in diverse research projects spanning clinical and experimental pharmacology, psychology, and neuroscience. He also participated in prestigious programs like the McNair Scholars and Pathways to Research Program. Before joining the NDL, Dante was selected for the highly competitive Minnesota Inclusive Neuroscience Development Scholars (MINDS) Program, a two-year post-baccalaureate program. Under the mentorship of Dr. Rene Pierpont in the Minnesota Investigators of Neurodevelopmental Disabilities Laboratory, he focused on studying rare genetic disorders in children. Concurrently, he worked with Dr. Jed Elison in the Cognition and Neurodevelopmental Studies Lab, investigating early developmental processes that influence individual differences in social communication during infancy and toddlerhood, particularly in relation to autism.

Dante’s research interests center on exploring the neuropsychological, neurological, and genetic correlates of neurodevelopmental disorders in pediatric populations. His goal is to stratify clinically homogeneous subgroups, delineate underlying mechanisms mediating long-term development, and improve targeted interventions to enhance quality of life outcomes.

His long-term aspirations include pursuing a career as a pediatric neuropsychologist at an academic medical center, where he can integrate his research and clinical expertise to positively impact children with neurodevelopmental disorders and their families.

Dante earned his B.S. in Psychology from the University of Minnesota, with minors in Neuroscience and Communication.

Alicia is a doctoral student in the Communication Sciences and Disorders program.

Alicia’s passion for pediatrics can be traced back to her senior year of high school in Chicago when she started her research on the Deaf community and milestones for children in diverse cultures, which sparked a curiosity in human development, communication differences, and the unique world of neurodiversity. After graduating from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with a B.S. in Speech and Hearing Science and an M.S. in Applied Behavior Analysis from The Chicago School, she has begun to continue her education at Northwestern University where she will obtain her PhD in Communication Sciences and Disorders. For Alicia, opening our minds to both behavior science and related sciences will increase our services to create bridges between areas where there are limited or out-of-scope approaches, and provide comprehensive care. Alicia’s specific interests include understanding verbal behavior and its connections to neurology and communicative disorders.