Zara is a third-year graduate student at UCCS in the Clinical Psychology Ph.D. 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 has been serving as a lab manager since Spring 2022. In her free time, Zara loves to spend time outside and be creative – cooking, painting, drawing, and design. 

Zara’s research primarily focuses on factors that promote or hinder posttraumatic growth and trauma disclosure processes in individuals who have experienced intimate partner violence. By examining these processes, she seeks to identify factors that facilitate growth and support recovery in the aftermath of violence.