Kayla Brown is a fifth-year doctoral student in the Developmental Psychology program at Penn State working with Dr. Erika Lunkenheimer, Dr. Koraly Perez-Edgar, and Dr. Nilam Ram. 

She received her B.S. in General Science from Penn State. She then spent two years studying temperament and attentional bias in children and adolescents with Dr. Koraly Perez-Edgar and Dr. Kristin Buss. Her research is focused on how individual differences in parents, children, and familial characteristics influence their dynamic interaction patterns and how these patterns shape child development, particularly in families at risk for child maltreatment. 

Working closely with Dr. Lunkenheimer and Dr. Perez-Edgar, she aims to use novel dynamic modeling methods on micro longitudinal data to investigate vital influences and patterns and identify salient targets to intervene on maladaptive parent-child interactions in families at risk for child maltreatment. 

Additionally, working with Dr. Ram, Kayla aims to investigate how we can use machine learning techniques to leverage large administrative data in order to better understand those at risk for severe trajectories of child maltreatment.