AMANDA TA

I have always aspired to be a clinical scientist. I’m also a psychology researcher and student at San Diego State University and my areas span tobacco/vaping policy in public housing and EEG-based cognitive control. Currently, I’m spending the next year working in neuroimaging labs at SDSU to build technical skill and a more biological foundation in order to supplement my current theoretical knowledge of the field. I have a year in public health environmental tobacco research focusing on policy in indoor environments, as well as several months running EEG sessions on healthy adult participants, both at SDSU.

Growing up in a Vietnamese American household made salient to me how cultural norms, limited mental health literacy, and stigma within Southeast Asian communities shape both the expression of distress and the willingness to seek care in immigrant families. This understanding, combined with witnessing the long-term benefits of therapy and medication in my own family, marked my first introduction to the field of psychology. These experiences led me to ask not only how treatment works, but also for whom and under what environmental and cultural conditions mental health outcomes can improve.

I sought to investigate these questions through research spanning public health and neuroscience during my undergraduate studies. In Fall of 2025, I worked on a research project under the mentorship of Dr. Lydia Greiner at SDSU’s Center for Tobacco and the Environment to examine the adoption of smoke- and vape-free policies in California state-subsidized housing. This experience equipped me with hands-on skills in analyzing public housing and survey data and operationalizing qualitative interview data into thematic codes, allowing us to systematically examine policy enforcement and disclosure. I also had the opportunity to present my findings at the 2026 SDSU symposium, where I gained a deeper understanding of how environmental factors, such as tobacco smoke exposure, shape behavioral and mental health disparities in low-income communities, and developed skills in effectively disseminating research findings to diverse audiences. The poster was selected for the Dean’s Award as one of the top two presentations in the College of Sciences for that year.

In Spring 2026, I worked under Dr. Emily Kappenman in her laboratory (emilykappenman.org), where I acquired, documented, and ensured the signal integrity in EEG datasets collected during an emotional spatial cueing (dot probe) task to examine the effects of threat-related stimuli on emotional and cognitive processes in healthy adults, later to be compared to clinical populations. In this role, I gained insight into how cognitive control processes are measured at the neural level and began to consider how neuroscience can inform clinical questions pertaining to psychopathology. I became particularly interested in the reliability and validity of baseline EEG measures of cognitive control across adults and whether these indices could serve as reliable biomarkers for anxiety risk.

I hope to further explore my research interests on how environmental factors, such as substance exposure and socioeconomic conditions, interact with neurocognitive processes to shape mental health outcomes, such as intergenerational trauma and emotional disorders. I hope to build on my prior experiences to produce work that is not only methodologically rigorous but also meaningfully contributes to the field. I want to conduct novel research using quantitative approaches to analyze behavioral and neural data, with the goal of better understanding the mechanisms underlying risk for psychopathology in low-income and immigrant populations.