Overview
Nicolas is a fifth-year doctoral student, Dean's Graduate Fellow, and NSF Graduate Research Fellowship recipient in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience's Clinical Program. He works primarily with Michael S. Gaffrey, PhD. Nicolas is interested in a variety of different lines of research, including measurement modeling, early childhood psychopathology, and emotion regulation. He also investigates functional neural correlates of depression and emotion regulation as well as the effects of parenting on children's mental health.
His long-term goals include understanding the way early childhood internalizing symptomatology may manifest itself in youth, how the relationships between emotion regulation and internalizing symptoms generalize to children with social and communication deficits, and the role that language plays in developing more highly personalized approaches to treatments for pediatric mood and anxiety disorders.
Nicolas graduated with a B.A. in Psychology from Columbia University in 2016. After completing his undergraduate studies, he worked as a Research Assistant on the Healthy Brain Network initiative (PI: Michael Milham, MD, PhD) at the Child Mind Institute. He then returned to Columbia for two years to work in the Developmental Affective Neuroscience Lab (PI: Nim Tottenham, PhD) as a lab manager before being admitted at Duke.