Faculty by Program

M.S. Clinical Psychology

All faculty teach multiple classes in the graduate program and participate in both mentoring and case consultations with second year students. Each faculty member evaluates second year comprehensive exams and is essential to the graduate students in our program.

• Dr. Glenn Callaghan - Professor, Clinical Psychology

  • Glenn Callghan
    DMH 322
    408-924-5610
    Glenn.Callaghan@sjsu.edu

    Dr. Callaghan teaches classes in assessment & case conceptualization and psychopharmacology. He conducts research on the assessment and delivery of psychotherapy for body image disturbance, depression, and personality disorders. His research also focuses on interpersonal relationship factors in psychotherapy, and idiographic assessment and classification systems. He conducts therapy and supervision from a functional contextual and behavioral perspective focusing on both intra- and interpersonal repertoires and problems.

• Dr. Matthew Capriotti -  Professor, Clinical Psychology

  • Matthew Capriotti
    DMH 318
    408-924-5641
    Matthew.Capriotti@sjsu.edu

    Dr. Capriotti teaches child psychopathology treatment and our evidence based practice course and research evaluation courses. His research aims to harness the power of behavioral principles to reduce human suffering. One major line of his work focuses on developing, testing, and disseminating evidence-based interventions for young people with obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders (e.g., chronic tic disorders and trichotillomania (hair-pulling disorder) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). He also pursues research aimed at identifying and resolving health and healthcare disparities faced by young people who are sexual and gender minorities (e.g., lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people). Dr. Capriotti conducts therapy and supervision from a contemporary behavioral perspective.

• Dr. Li Shen (Jesslyn) Chong - Assistant Professor, Clinical Psychology 

  • Li Shen (Jesslyn) Chong
    DMH 315
    408-924-3831
    Jess.Chong@sjsu.edu 

    Dr. Chong's research utilizes a biopsychosocial approach to understand how life adversities and stress response systems influence the risk of socio-emotional and health problems and racial/ethnic health disparities, with an overarching goal of informing and optimizing interventions. Clinically, Dr. Chong specializes in evidence-based treatment for children and adolescents. She conducts therapy and supervision in English, Chinese, and Cantonese, from cognitive behavioral and developmental frameworks. 

• Dr. Jennifer Gregg - Professor, Clinical Psychology  

  • Jennifer Gregg
    DMH 317
    408-924-5621
    Jennifer.Gregg@sjsu.edu

    Dr. Gregg teaches our courses in adult psychopathology the theories and methods of psychotherapy. Her research interests are in avoidance coping, chronic health conditions, PTSD, and primary care. She is specialist in conducting and training Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Dr. Gregg conducts therapy and supervision from an existential and functional contextual or third wave behavioral perspective.

• Dr. Lynda Heiden - Professor, Clinical Psychology  
  • Lynda Heiden
    DMH 319
    408-924-5647
    lynda.heiden@sjsu.edu
• Dr. Elena Klaw - Professor, Clinical Psychology

  • Elena Klaw
    DMH 324
    408-924-6961
    elena.klaw@sjsu.edu

    Dr. Klaw teaches courses in cultural awareness and sensitivity, modern family issues, and group psychotherapy. Dr. Klaw’s research interests are in clinical and community psychology, mentoring, gender roles, relationship violence, and adolescent development. She conducts supervision from a feminist, psychodynamic, and community perspective with adolescents, adults, and couples.

• Dr. Lesther Papa - Assistant Professor, Clinical Psychology

  • DMH 323
    408-924-5671
    lesther.papa@sjsu.edu

    Dr. Papa's research focuses on the experiences of racial and ethnic microaggressions in higher education. His clinical experience intersects school psychology with clinical/counseling psychology for children and families. Dr. Papa conducts supervision and therapy from a multicultural feminist framework.

• Dr. Juan Peña - Assistant Professor, Clinical Psychology

  • DMH 321
    408-924-5947
    juan.m.pena@sjsu.edu 

    Dr. Peña’s research focuses on the social determinants of health that contribute to physical and mental health disparities among populations most underrepresented in research, with a focus on Hispanic or Latino/a/x people and immigrant communities. Another area of research is on community engaged research approaches (e.g., CBPR) to improve health and social equity. Dr. Peña conducts therapy and supervision from a cognitive behavioral and multicultural framework in English and Spanish.

• Dr. Erin Woodhead -Program Coordinator, Professor, Clinical Psychology

  • Erin Woodhead
    DMH 316
    408-924-5654
    erin.woodhead@sjsu.edu

    Dr. Woodhead’s teaches courses in ethics, lifespan development, and the treatment of addictions. Her research interests include health care decision making among older adults, interventions to facilitate mental health treatment among older adults, and increasing aging content in undergraduate and graduate psychology curricula. Dr. Woodhead treats adults and older populations. She approaches therapy from a cognitive behavioral framework.

M.S. Industrial/Organizational Psychology

• Dr. Jacquelyn Brady - Associate Professor

  • DMH 320
    408-924-7855
    jacquelyn.brady@sjsu.edu

    Dr. Brady is an Associate Professor of Psychology and specializes in Industrial Organizational (I/O) Psychology and the subfield of Occupational Health Psychology (OHP), which bridges her background in I/O and Social Health Psychology. Dr. Brady’s research interests are primarily in OHP, specifically, she focuses on the inextricable link between work factors and well-being and work outcomes. The goal of her work is to share meaningful strategies organizations can utilize to improve employee health, safety, and general well-being across work and non-work domains. To learn more about her current projects, or if you are interested in joining her lab, please visit her lab website at https://wowresearch.weebly.com/. Fun fact: Dr. Brady is a CSU alum, having completed her undergraduate degree at California State University San Marcos, where she learned firsthand about the benefits of exceptional mentorship.

• Dr. Megumi Hosoda - Professor I/O Psychology; Major Advisor

  • Megumi Hosoda
    DMH 315
    408-924-5637
    megumi.hosoda@sjsu.edu

    Megumi Hosoda is Professor of Psychology at San José State University. She received her PhD in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from the University at Albany, New York State University.  Her main research area is diversity and inclusion in the workplace. She studies various types of diversity in the workplace, including sex/gender, race/ethnicity, immigrants, and disability. Her current research emphasizes the issues related to immigrant workers and the identification of contextual factors that increase the acceptance of foreign-accented individuals. The results of her research have appeared in Personnel Psychology, Journal of Managerial Psychology, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Journal of Organizational Psychology, College Student Journal, Human Resource Management Review, Disability Studies Quarterly, and Journal of Social Psychology.

• Dr. Howard Tokunaga - Program Coordinator, M.S. in I/O Graduate Program 

  • Howard Tokunaga
    DMH 320
    408-924-5649
    howard.tokunaga@sjsu.edu

    Howard Tokunaga is a Professor of Psychology and serves as Coordinator of the MS Program in Industrial/Organizational (I/O) Psychology and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in statistics, research methods, and I/O psychology.  He received his bachelor’s degree in psychology at UC Santa Cruz and his Ph.D. in psychology at UC Berkeley. In addition to his teaching, he has consulted with a number of public sector and private sector organizations on a wide variety of management and human resource issues. He is the author of Fundamental Statistics for the Social and Behavioral Sciences and Moving from IBM SPSS to R and RStudio:  A Statistics Companion and co-author (with G. Keppel) of Introduction to Design and Analysis:  A Student’s Handbook

M.A. Research and Experimental Psychology

All faculty teach multiple classes in the graduate program and participate in both mentoring and case consultations with second year students. Each faculty member evaluates first and second year comprehensive exams and is essential in the graduate students into our program.

• Dr. Arlene Asuncion - Professor, Social Psychology

  • Arlene Asuncion
    DMH 322
    408-924-5609
    arlene.asuncion@sjsu.edu
    

    Dr. Arlene Asuncion earned her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1993. Dr. Asuncion was a faculty member at the University of Texas at Arlington before joining the faculty at San Jose State University in 1995.

    Dr. Asuncion's current research focuses on the influence of affective states on social information processing. This work primarily examines how perceivers' mood states impact their processing of persuasive messages and information about other individuals. In addition to this research, Dr. Asuncion is also interested in peoples' stereotypes about and attitudes towards different social groups, including ethnic minorities and other stigmatized groups. She is particularly interested in how minority groups view themselves as well as each other.

    Dr. Asuncion is a Professor of Psychology and teaches courses in Social Psychology at both the graduate and undergraduate levels as well as an undergraduate course on the Psychology of Prejudice.

• Dr. Désia Bacon - Assistant Professor, Developmental 

  • DMH 323
    408-924-5640
    Desia.Bacon@sjsu.edu 

    Dr. Désia Bacon earned her Ph.D. in (Developmental) Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2023. She previously earned her B.S. from the University of Central Florida, and her M.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She joined the San José State University department of Psychology faculty in Fall 2023.
     
    Broadly, Dr. Bacon is interested in how children use the varied information in their environment to help them learn. Her primary research centers on the intersection of language and social development, with specific focus on how young children utilize perceptual and social cues in their environment to facilitate their language learning. Her research perspective is rooted in understanding how the diversity of children’s lives impacts their development, utilizing a variety of research methodologies that meet families where they are at.

• Dr. Valerie Carr - Professor, Neuroscience; Associate Chair

  • DMH 318
    408-924-5630
    valerie.carr@sjsu.edu

    Dr. Valerie Carr earned her PhD in Neuroscience from UCLA in 2008 where she examined strategic factors influencing memory in both younger and older adults. Afterwards she pursued an NIH-funded postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University where she investigated neural mechanisms of memory and how these mechanisms change with age. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Psychology department where she leverages her knowledge of cognitive neuroscience to understand factors that influence the content, quality, and durability of memories across the lifespan.

    Students in her lab conduct research investigating whether and how factors such as aerobic fitness, mobile device use, and wakeful rest affect long-term memory and executive function. Additionally, Dr Carr maintains strong collaborative relationships with researchers at Stanford University and members of the Hippocampal Subfields Group regarding the structure and function of medial temporal lobe subfields. Finally, given Dr Carr’s passion for teaching social science students how to program (see: Applied Computing for Behavioral and Social Sciences), she is involved in pedagogical research regarding interdisciplinary computing.

• Dr. Cheryl Chancellor-Freeland - Professor, Biological Psychology

  • DMH 317
    408-924-5645
    cheryl.chancellor-freeland@sjsu.edu

    Dr. Chancellor-Freeland received her doctorate degree from UC Santa Barbara in biopsychology in 1992. Her field of interest was thermoregulation. She completed 4.5 years of postdoctoral work at Boston University Medical School, first as a training fellow, and then as an associate in the departments of microbiology and neurobiology, respectively. This was followed by a one-year appointment as interim Writing Director at CSU Monterey Bay.

    Dr. Chancellor-Freeland's research interests include the topics of stress, immunology, neurodegeneration, and cognitive performance. Publications can be found in the area of neuroscience, psychosomatic medicine, and immunology.

• Dr. Shinchieh (CJ) Duh - Associate Professor, Developmental Psychology

  • Shinchieh Duh
    DMH 324
    408-924-6039
    CJ.Duh@sjsu.edu

    Dr. Shinchieh (C.J.) Duh earned her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of California Santa Cruz in 2014. Dr. Duh was an adjunct faculty at San Francisco State University (2011-2013) before joining the SJSU Psychology Department. Her research focuses on young children’s reasoning, the processes of teaching and learning (in family or school), and cross-cultural comparisons (in the U.S., Taiwan, Korea, and China thus far). Her scholarly work can be seen in several referred journals including Cognitive Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Children and Youth Services Review, Journal of Research in Childhood Education, and Journal of Education and Learning.

• Dr. Greg Feist - Professor, Personality Psychology

  • Greg Feist
    DMH 313
    408-924-5617
    greg.feist@sjsu.edu

    Gregory J. Feist currently is Professor of Psychology in Personality at San Jose State University. He has also taught at the College of William & Mary and the University of California at Davis. He received his PhD in 1991 from the University of California at Berkeley and his undergraduate degree in 1985 from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He is widely published in the psychology of creativity, the psychology of science, and the development of scientific talent. One major focus of his is establishing the psychology of science as an independent study of science, along the lines of the history, philosophy, and sociology of science. His major efforts toward this end are: Psychology of Science and the Origins of the Scientific Mind (2006, Yale University Press), which was awarded the 2007 William James Book Prize by the Division of General Psychology, American Psychological Association (APA);  and was founding president of the “International Society for the Psychology of Science and Technology”. Some recent research projects have included the topics:

    -creativity and mental health
    -motivated reasoning and scientific thinking
    -creativity, language, and meaning

    His research in creativity and personality has been recognized with the Berlyne Award from the Division for Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts (Division 10) of American Psychological Association (APA). Feist is former President of APA’s Division 10, and is or has been on the Editorial Boards of Review of General Psychology,Social Epistemology, Journal of Research in Personality, and Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts.  His teaching efforts have been recognized by outstanding teaching awards at both UC Berkeley and UC Davis. Feist is also co-author of Psychology: Perspectives and Connections, Fundamental of Psychology: Perspectives and Connections, and Theories of Personality, as well as co-editor of the Handbook of the Psychology of Science, and Cambridge Handbook of Creativity and Personality.

• Dr. Cary Feria - Associate Professor, Perception

  • Cary Feria
    DMH 312
    408-924-5620
    cary.feria@sjsu.edu

    Dr. Cary Feria earned her Ph.D. in Psychology from UC Irvine in 2004. She was a faculty member at Morehead State University in Kentucky before joining San Jose State University in 2008. Dr. Feria also is an adjunct faculty member in the SJSU M.S. Program in Human Factors & Ergonomics. Dr. Feria teaches courses related to Perception and Research Methods.

    Dr. Feria's area of research is visual perception. Her research interests include visual attention, multiple object tracking, visual search, and depth perception. Dr. Feria also has research interests in the field of human factors.

• Dr. Bianca Hinojosa - Assistant Professor

  • Bianca Hinojosa 
    DMH 319
    408-924-5741
    bianca.hinojosa@sjsu.edu

    Bianca Hinojosa earned her Ph.D. in psychological sciences with an emphasis in health psychology at the University of California, Merced. She earned her MA in general/experimental psychology at California State University, Fresno, where she was an NIH Bridges to Doctorate Scholar. Bianca researches how intergroup interactions and biases influence the well-being of people of color. Her research program broadly focuses on stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination toward the Latinx population and its effects on Latinx peoples’ health and well-being.

• Dr. Sean Laraway - Professor, Learning & Memory

  • Sean Laraway 
    DMH 311
    408-924-5679
    sean.laraway@sjsu.edu

    Dr. Sean Laraway earned his Ph.D. in the Experimental Analysis of Behavior from Western Michigan University in 2003. He also earned a graduate certificate in human performance technology (organizational behavior) from WMU. Upon graduation, he served as a postdoctoral fellow in behavioral pharmacology at WMU, where he worked on research funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

    Dr. Laraway has taught at San José State University since 2004 and serves as adjunct faculty in the SJSU MS Program in Human Factors & Ergonomics. His research interests include learning, motivation, behavior analysis, drug use and abuse, behavioral pharmacology, consumer behavior, and human factors/ergonomics.

• Dr. Christine Ma-Kellams - Associate Professor, Program Coordinator, Social Psychology

  • Christine Ma-Kellams 
    DMH 312
    408-924-5562
    Christine.Ma-Kellams@sjsu.edu

    Dr. Christine Ma-Kellams received her Ph.D. in social psychology from UC Santa Barbara in 2011 and completed her postdoctoral training at Harvard University. Prior to SJSU, she was an assistant professor at the University of La Verne. She joined the department of Psychology at San Jose State University in Fall 2019.

    Her research interests focus on cross-cultural differences, close relationships, emotion, and decision-making. She is interested in culture, broadly defined, including not just race/ethnicity, but also class/socioeconomic status, gender, political orientation, and religion. Her recent work has included the use of Big Data in the form of internet searches to explore group differences in a variety of applied outcomes, including public health and politics.

• Dr. Evan Palmer -  Professor, Cognition and Human Factors; Department Chair

  • DMH 316
    408-924-5547
    evan.palmer@sjsu.edu

    Additional Webpage: lavalab.net

    Dr. Evan Palmer holds a B.S. in Cognitive Science and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology, both from UCLA. Following graduate school, he completed a four year post-doctoral research fellowship at Harvard Medical School. Four nine years, Dr. Palmer was a member of the Human Factors Psychology faculty at Wichita State University before joining the Psychology Department at San José State University in 2016. Dr. Palmer is the graduate coordinator of the M.A. Program in Research and Experimental Psychology in the Psychology Department and a faculty member of the M.S. Program in Human Factors/Ergonomics in the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department. He is also affiliated with the minors in Applied Computing for the Behavioral and Social Sciences and Human Systems Integration. Currently, Dr. Palmer teaches courses in Cognition, Perception, Human Factors, and Cognitive Science.

    Dr. Palmer’s research centers on applying principles from cognition, attention, and perception to solve real-world problems. He specializes in studying visual perception and attention and is head of the Learning, Attention, Vision, and Application (LAVA) Lab at San José State University. Current research topics include motivational design through gamification, computational theories of visual search, human factors in healthcare, data visualization, web page perception, shape perception, visual attention, and visual search. In addition to basic research, LAVA has done contract work including eye tracking analyses of restaurant menus, usability analyses of websites and products, and design of supplementary materials and website activities for a sensation and perception textbook.

• Dr. Desiree Ryan - Assistant Professor, Social Psychology 

  • Desiree Ryan 
    DMH 316
    408-924-5545
    desiree.ryan@sjsu.edu

    Dr. Desiree Ryan received her doctorate in social psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz in Spring 2024. Her research examines classism in political contexts, media portrayals of classist stereotypes, and the implications of rising political polarization and economic inequality. She conducts student-driven, community-engaged, basic needs research examining college students’ lived experiences of food and housing insecurity and their recommendations for change.

• Dr. David Schuster - Professor, Human Factors

  • David Schuster
    DMH 315
    408-924-5659
    david.schuster@sjsu.edu

    Additional Webpage: vectrlab.net

    David Schuster earned his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Central Florida in 2013, specializing in applied experimental psychology and human factors. While pursuing his Ph.D., Dr. Schuster was a member of the Team Performance Laboratory at the UCF Institute for Simulation and Training. During that time, Dr. Schuster supervised multiple research projects centered on understanding individual and shared cognition in complex environments. He joined the SJSU Department of Psychology in 2013.

    Dr. Schuster’s research centers on understanding individual and shared cognition in complex environments. He has conducted research in domains such as aviation, transportation security training, and military human-robot interaction. Currently, he is interested in how complex sociotechnical systems support or hinder people, with a particular focus on decision making among cybersecurity professionals. In 2015, he was awarded a five-year NSF CAREER award to study human cognition in cyber defense. Since that time, he has been awarded supplemental scholarships from NSF to fund undergraduate research training and has mentored over 50 students in his Virtual Environments, Cognition and Training Research (VECTR) Lab. He is a co-investigator of an NSF-funded technology pathway program, which led to a minor in computer programming for CoSS majors. In total, he has been PI or Co-PI on over $1M in externally funded research since joining SJSU. In 2017, he received the Early Career Investigator Award from the SJSU Research Foundation.

    Dr. Schuster has co-authored over 30 papers in journals, edited books, and conference proceedings. His work has appeared in Ergonomics and Human Factors. Dr. Schuster has presented at the IEEE Conference on Cognitive Methods in Situation Awareness and Decision Support and the NATO Information Systems and Technology Panel Symposium on Emerged and Emerging Disruptive Technologies. He is a member of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

• Dr. Susan Snycerski; Professor, Biological Psychology

  • Susan Snycerski
    DMH 311
    408-924-5662
    susan.snycerski@sjsu.edu

    Dr. Susan Snycerski earned her Ph.D. in the Experimental Analysis of Behavior at Western Michigan University (WMU) in 2002. She completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in behavioral pharmacology supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, in which she examined the effects of gamma-hydroxybutyrate (GHB, the “date rape” drug) on learning and memory in rats. She also holds a Graduate Certificate in Clinical Trials Administration from WMU.

    Dr. Snycerski was a full-time lecturer in the Department of Psychology at SJSU for 10 years prior to starting her position as an Assistant Professor.  Courses that she regularly teaches include Drugs, Brain, and Behavior; Human Learning; and General Psychology.

    Dr. Snycerski’s varied research interests include biological psychology, behavioral pharmacology, drug use and abuse, behavior analysis, motivation, online learning/education, and animal wellness. She has published empirical, theoretical, and methodological articles, as well as book chapters and encyclopedia entries.

• Dr. Christina Tzeng - Assistant Professor, Cognitive Psychology

  • Christina Tzeng
    DMH 314
    408-924-5706
    christina.tzeng@sjsu.edu

    Dr. Christina Tzeng earned her Ph.D. in Psychology from Emory University, where she continued as a postdoctoral scholar prior to joining the Psychology Department at San José State University in 2020.Dr. Tzeng studies the plasticity of the perceptual system, focusing on the cognitive and social mechanisms that underlie how we understand spoken language. Spoken language is a highly complex signal that conveys information not only about objects and events in the world but also information about who is talking.Despite the vast amount of variability in the production of words across different voices and communicative contexts, listeners understand spoken utterances. Dr. Tzeng’s research draws from cognitive psychology, social psychology, and linguistics to explore two fundamental questions:

    How do we adapt to unfamiliar pronunciations?

    Dr. Tzeng investigates how memory and attentional mechanisms affect listeners’ ability to overcome variations in pronunciation and how listeners generalize this learning to novel listening situations (e.g., unfamiliar voices, accents).

    How does information about who is talking affect what we hear?

    Dr. Tzeng explores how talker characteristics such as the ethnicity, language background, and age affect listeners’ perception of the talker (e.g., comprehensibility, accentedness) and of what is said (e.g., whine vs. wine, beak vs. peak).

• Dr. Mark Van Selst - Professor, Cognitive Psychology

  • Mark Van Selst
    DMH 157
    408-924-5674
    mark.vanselst@sjsu.edu

    NOTE: Dr. Van Selst is currently serving as Interim Department Chair and is not accepting students at this time.

    Dr. Van Selst earned his BA in Psychology from the University of British Columbia (including published work on the role of attention on self-presentation) and his MA [1991] and Ph.D. [1995] in Psychology (Cognition) at the University of Waterloo (Canada).  After moving to the United States, he worked at the NASA-Ames Research Center (Mountain View, California) as a National Research Council Resident Research Associate with the Human Systems Integration Division.  He started at SJSU in 1997, achieving the rank of full professor in 2007.  On the research side, Dr. Van Selst has a background and publication record in processes underlying dual-task interference, visual cognition (mental rotation, image scanning), lexical processing (word frequency effects), statistical outlier elimination procedures (monte carlo simulations), Unconscious processes (measurement issues), and the effects of alcohol on cognitive performance (including go/no-go decisions).  Other domains of interest include crew miscommunication and error recovery (both planes and sailboats), design-facilitated errors, prospective memory failures, Stroop interference, and modality effects.  His most recent research investigates the validity of the Implicit Association Test in examining bias in cross-cultural differences, sexuality, and pet-ownership.  As the lead advisor for our undergraduate programs in the department, and as a statewide academic senator representing SJSU at the CSU system level (since 2002), he has developed expertise in student transfer, the role of general education, and alternatives to remediation.  In any given semester, Dr. Van Selst typically teaches one or more of cognitive psychology, introductory psychology, research methods, and/or the capstone seminar for our undergraduate honors program (other courses on a less frequent basis).