Alex is the worst. He asks a lot of people and is never pleased. Luckily, he has good people surrounding him to make him better.

Aside from that, he received his BA in Psychology with a minor in Cognitive Science from UCLA in 2013 and took an interest in researching stress and coping within health domains, the ways in which culture may change these processes, and the underlying neuroscience that may govern these processes. He was also involved in community outreach organizations to get resources out to, in particular, communities of color and low-income families while being an advocate for behaviors that would support sustainability and environmentally-conscious practices.

From there, he graduated from UC Riverside with his Psychology Ph.D. in 2019. Here, he was interested in the science of communication, particularly between couples coping with long-term conditions (e.g., breast cancer) and minority stress (e.g., same-gender couples). Alex has many interests and has also been involved in studies regarding race and justification of the (damaging) social systems in the United States, the specific stressors first-generation students face and how they overcome them, how individuals tell stories about themselves that may reflect their well-being, and synchronies in physiology between parents and their young children while coping with stress. 

His last stop before devoting his life to this organization was as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Here, he continued expanding his topic repertoire to include research on HIV prevention and treatment, reducing opioid misuse, individual, social, and structural factors that influence vaccination (i.e., flu, MMR, HPV), and the science of persuasion. He further pursued machine learning, artificial intelligence, app creation, and social media as ways to both disseminate information and also collect opinions on the issues that plague society. 
 

His goal in life is to use the knowledge and skills he has gained over the years to help communication between researchers, the community, and organizations that wish to help the people. In his eyes, it’s only a matter of time before the divides between different sectors of society are filled with and connected by knowledge and he wants to do his part to realize this eventuality.

Liz met Alex at an SPSP conference in 2019 and they bonded over their passion for relationship research (and their fear of public speaking). The rest is history...

 

Liz received her BA in Psychology from University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth in 2013 and completed an honors project that examined resilience and positive emotions in friendship maintenance. During this time, she was actively involved in Psi Chi and other organizations on campus, one of which included tutoring first-generation college students like herself. 

 

In 2015, she earned a MA in Research Psychology from her alma mater. Soon after, she moved to Illinois and took on a position as a Project Coordinator working on Project SCAN’D (Social Contexts and Adolescent Neural Development), a federally funded study by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Specifically, the purpose of this research was to better understand the neural underpinnings of social experience and decision making in adolescents. 

 

Liz received her Ph.D. in Social/Personality at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has conducted research on various topics such as morality/ethics, lie detection, and most notably, attachment and donor-conception. In addition to her research pursuits, she serves as a statistical consultant and data analyst on the Stronger Families Project, funded by the United Service Organizations Inc. (USO) under the direction of Dr. Leihua Edstrom from Northwest University. 

 

Liz's passion is to communicate science to the public, both in and out of the classroom. What better way to combine her passion for open science and research with teaching than to help make an entire company devoted to it!?