Zara is a first-year graduate student at UCCS in the Clinical Psychology PhD program with a focus on Trauma Psychology. She received her B.A. in Psychology from Vanderbilt University. Prior to graduating, Zara’s research interests surrounded physiological processes in the body. She worked with Dr. Lauren Woodard at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, engineering urine-derived stem cells to produce proteins that would prevent kidney injury following rhabdomyolysis. After her undergraduate years and a career shift, she began pursuing research in psychology under the mentorship of Dr. Ashleigh Maxcey and Dr. Isabel Gauthier at Vanderbilt University. There, she investigated the paradigm of induced forgetting and object perception. She joined the Cognition, Emotion, and Well-Being Lab in Fall 2022 and is excited to be involved in trauma research. In her free time, Zara loves to be creative – cooking, painting, drawing, and design.  

Zara’s research interests include the relationship between trauma and memory and mechanisms of vulnerability and resilience.