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Overview


Nicolas is a sixth-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. He will be completing pre-doctoral internship at the Western Psychiatric Hospital / University of Pittsburgh starting September 2025.

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.

Current Appointments & Affiliations


In the News


Published November 2, 2021
Duke graduate students create clinical psychology anti-racism lecture series

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Recent Publications


Early childhood neural reward-related reactivity concurrently and prospectively associates with depressive symptom severity.

Journal Article Journal of affective disorders · June 2026 The emergence of depression during the preschool years is well established. However, the neural correlates of depressive symptoms during this developmental period remain relatively understudied. Prior work has suggested a concurrent association between lef ... Full text Cite

Dimensions of Depressive Symptoms in Young Children: Factor Analysis of the Preschool Feelings Checklist-Scale.

Journal Article Assessment · June 2025 The current study is an investigation of the dimensionality of the Preschool Feelings Checklist-Scale (PFC-S), a caregiver-report questionnaire of early childhood depressive symptom severity. Caregivers of 450 young children, ages 3-8 years (M = 5.6 ... Full text Cite

Probing the content of affective semantic memory following caregiving-related early adversity.

Journal Article Developmental science · November 2024 Cognitive science has demonstrated that we construct knowledge about the world by abstracting patterns from routinely encountered experiences and storing them as semantic memories. This preregistered study tested the hypothesis that caregiving-related earl ... Full text Cite
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GitHub Page