This summer, TYDE is hosting our annual Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship, awarding UVA undergraduate students working on a research project under the supervision of a faculty member. Continue reading to meet the eight undergraduate fellows who were selected this year and learn about the important work they are doing this summer!
Chloe Wang (School of Data Science)
Chloe Wang was selected to work with Aiying Zhang on her research project examining how digital technology use relates to brain development and mental health in adolescents. Using the Human Connectome Project in Development dataset, Chloe will study how screen time and media use connect to functional brain network patterns and outcomes like anxiety, depression, and attention difficulties. Chloe is responsible for developing research questions and conducting a literature review to run analyses with graph theory, machine learning, and multivariate mediation models. The project is designed to offer a rich and independent research experience that contributes new insights into how digital technologies interact with youth brain development.
Suzy Chu & Alyssa Waddy (School of Education & Human Development)
Suzy Chu & Alyssa Waddy were selected to work with Jamie Jirout on her project investigating how undergraduate students engage with generative artificial intelligence (GAI) tools to support their learning, writing, and application of course content in the context of child development. The fellows on this project are combing through real student-AI conversations, weekly reflections, and self-reported accounts of how — and how much — AI shaped their work. Using qualitative analysis software, they will look for patterns in what students found helpful, what felt hollow, and where ethical questions came up. Suzy & Alyssa are also contributing to a literature review on how digital tools affect student motivation, equity, and self-directed learning.
Eva Bringard (School of Education & Human Development)
Eva Bringard was selected to work with Catherine Bradshaw on Coping Power-Digital, a program designed to help students in grades 4–8 navigate digital media in healthier ways. The program has already been piloted in schools across Virginia and North Carolina, and Eva is now contributing to the program’s evaluation by analyzing survey data and conducting qualitative coding of interviews with the teachers and counselors who facilitated its implementation. By the end of the TYDE fellowship, Eva will have contributed to data cleaning and analysis, a refined and implementation-ready curriculum, and preliminary findings that position the project for larger-scale funding and broader school-based dissemination. Her work this summer will also help her develop advanced research skills, gain publication skills, and result in a poster session presentation at the Hunter Student Research Conference in spring 2027.
Caroline Clippinger (School of Arts & Sciences – Psychology Department)
Caroline Clippinger was selected to work with Adrienne Wood on her ongoing study examining how digital and in-person communication with old and new ties jointly shape social behavior and well-being during the transition to college. As part of a longitudinal study tracking first-year UVA students through their social transitions, Caroline is working with a rich dataset that captures who students talk to, whether those conversations happen in person or on a screen, and how all of it connects to their sense of belonging and well-being. This summer, Caroline will be writing and refining data cleaning scripts of nearly 7,000 unique names that study participants reported as interaction partners. Caroline will also help improve how the study recruits and retains participants for its second round of data collection in Fall 2026, drawing on her firsthand experience as a research assistant during Year 1. By the end of the summer, Caroline will utilize her findings to create the foundation of a senior thesis — designing her own follow-up study on how young people decide what counts as a meaningful connection in a world where friendships increasingly live on both sides of a screen.
Andrew Holland (School of Engineering & Applied Science)
Andrew Holland was selected to work with Laura Barnes on her project focused on developing scalable infrastructure for deploying and managing smartphone- and wearable-based research studies in real-world settings for anxious teens and emerging adults. Andrew is responsible for developing Python-based tools that translate study designs into the technical formats that smartphone and wearable apps need to run. Andrew will help test and validate the pipelines he builds, making sure data coming in from participants’ phones and wearables is accurate and reliable. This work will directly support two active projects: one updating a mobile app that delivers anxiety interventions to teenagers, and another using wearable sensors to detect social anxiety in real time and nudge users toward healthier responses in the moment.
Zachary Masaitis (School of Engineering & Applied Science)
Zachary Masaitis was selected to work with Subigya Nepal on his project “Developing Open-Source Data Donation Infrastructure for AI Chatbot Logs to Support Youth Mental Health Research”. Millions of teenagers are turning to AI chatbots for emotional support, but researchers have almost no reliable way to study what’s happening in those conversations. Zachary’s work this summer focuses on building technical infrastructure to change that — adapting an open-source data donation framework so that young people can securely share their chat logs from platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Character.AI, and Snapchat AI with researchers, while keeping their personal information private. Zachary will serve as a primary developer on the projects, designing and implementing platform-specific parsing scripts that make sense of each platform’s unique data format, as well as building an automated system that strips chatbot logs of personally identifiable information to ensure data integrity across platforms. The developed infrastructure will be utilized in two active studies — WellConnected, exploring how AI companionship relates to real-world friendship quality, and Youth AI Chatbot Use and Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviors (STBs), examining how teens with elevated anxiety or suicidal thoughts engage with AI for emotional support.
Bessie Wang (School of Arts & Sciences – Psychology Department)
Bessie was selected to work with Stefanie Sequeira on the Teens’ Emotions and Daily Digital Interactions (TEDDI) project – is to learn more about how engagement in specific social media behaviors is associated with variability in youths’ emotions, self-concept, and brain development. The study follows 75 young people ages 11–17, checking in with them multiple times a day for over two weeks to ask about their moods, self-image, and what they’re doing on social media — whether that’s comparing themselves to others, reaching out to friends, or scrolling through AI tools. Participants also complete brain scans so researchers can examine how social media habits connect to neural activity related to self-perception and social reward. Bessie is responsible for conducting study visits, keeping tabs on participants’ daily check-in responses, and supporting data cleaning and analysis.
Tyler M. Wickham (School of Education & Human Development)
Tyler was selected to work with Michael Lyons on two projects: the Youth Mental Health Data Dashboard Project, and a TYDE-funded project to use quasi-experimental methods to understand the effects of cell phone bans on student behavioral performance in school (e.g., how do cell phone bans impact school-level reports of bullying and school climate). Tyler will work with data from Virginia’s Department of Education to examine how schools’ disciplinary practices around technology connect to school climate, and whether factors like a school’s racial makeup or socioeconomic status influence these practices. The project uses pre-ban data as a baseline, which will eventually allow researchers to compare what schools looked like before the statewide policy took effect against what comes after. Tyler is responsible for refining the overall aim and scope of the research project, conducting literature reviews, cleaning and maintaining relevant data, and performing data analysis.
Congratulations to our Undergraduate Summer Research Fellows!
