Natalie Kells

Graduate Student

Natalie graduated from the University of Connecticut in May 2025, with a B.A. in Psychological Sciences and a minor in Human Development and Family Sciences. Since graduating, she has been working as a lab manager in the Applied Cognition and Personalized Neuroscience (ACORN) Lab. Her primary role was to handle lab administrative processes and lead a study on individual differences in attention, psychopathology, and lived experience (MAPLE). She contributed to various aspects of this study, from developing the research protocol and writing a preregistration paper to recruiting participants and collecting fMRI and self-report data. Natalie is very excited to begin her graduate career in UConn’s Psychological Sciences–Language and Cognition Master’s program this Fall (2026). She is interested in learning more about how early life environments, including physical exposures, adversity, and sociocultural factors, are associated with cognition and transdiagnostic symptoms. She ultimately aims to examine how biopsychosocial mechanisms of early life environments contribute to psychopathology, with an emphasis on individual differences. In her free time, she likes to bake sweet treats, scrapbook, and obsess over her many cats.