OUR TEAM

Spanning multiple institutions, our team has the unique opportunity to collaborate across four cities and two continents!

Principal Investigators

Niobe Way

Dr. Way is a Professor of Applied Psychology in the Department of Applied Psychology at New York University. She is also the co-Director of the Center for Research on Culture, Development, and Education at NYU and a past President of the Society for Research on Adolescence. Dr. Way's research focuses on the intersections of culture, context, and development, with a particular focus on the social and emotional development of adolescents. She is interested in how schools, families, and peers as well as larger political and economic contexts influence developmental trajectories. Her work also focuses on social identities, including gender and racial/ethnic identities, and the effects of gender and racial/ethnic stereotypes on adjustment and friendships. Dr. Way is a nationally recognized leader in the field of adolescent development; she has been studying the social and emotional development of girls and boys for over two decades.

Hiro Yoshikawa

Dr. Yoshikawa is the Courtney Sale Ross Professor of Globalization and Education at NYU Steinhardt and a Professor at NYU, and co-directs NYU's Global TIES for Children Center. He is a faculty member of the Psychology of Social Intervention and Human Development and Social Intervention programs. He is also a faculty affiliate of the Metropolitan Center for Equity and the Transformation of Schools and the Institute on Human Development and Social Change at NYU. Dr. Yoshikawa is a community and developmental psychologist who studies the effects of public policies and programs related to immigration, early childhood, and poverty reduction on children’s development. He has also conducted research on culture, sexuality and youth and young adult development in the contexts of HIV / AIDS risk and prevention and is currently conducting research on GSAs (gender and sexuality alliances).
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Sumie Okazaki

Dr. Okazaki is a Professor of Counseling Psychology in the Department of Applied Psychology at New York University She conducts research on the impact of immigration, social change, and race (i.e., racism, racial identity, racialization) on Asian and Asian American adolescents, emerging adults, and parents within local and transnational contexts. With colleagues in anthropology, education, and developmental psychology as well as community partners, she has previously worked with or has ongoing research projects with urban adolescents of color and immigrant young adults in New York City; Chinese parents and adolescents in Nanjing, China; Korean American adolescents and parents in Chicago; and current and former Korean early study abroad students in New York City, the Philippines, and Seoul, South Korea.

Xinyin Chen

Dr. Chen is a Professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Chen’s research focuses on children's and adolescents’ socioemotional functioning and its role in social, school, and psychological adjustment from a contextual-developmental perspective. He is interested in the developmental processes of social competence, shyness-inhibition, and aggression, and dispositional/biological and socialization factors that are involved in these processes. He has conducted, in collaboration with international colleagues, a series of longitudinal projects in China, North America, and elsewhere. The projects are based largely on a theoretical framework he has developed concerning how cultural values are involved in social initiative and self-control during development.

Xuan Li

Dr. Li is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at NYU Shanghai, and is an affiliated member of NYU-ECNU Institute for Social Development, and Department of Applied Psychology, NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Professor Li ’s research focuses on fatherhood, parent-child interactions and relationships, and children and adolescents’ socioemotional development in contemporary Chinese societies. She is also interested in general issues pertaining to human development, family research, and gender studies. She has authored several book chapters on family and parent-child relations in China, and her work has appeared in interdisciplinary journals such as Cross-Cultural Research and China Quarterly. She is currently completing a monograph Chinese Fatherhood: Ideals, Involvement, Interactions, and Influences, to be published by Routledge.
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Lixian Cui

Dr. Cui is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at NYU Shanghai, a faculty affiliate in the NYU-ECNU Institute for Social Development and in the Department of Applied Psychology at NYU, and the Center for Research on Culture, Development and Education at NYU. Professor Cui's research focuses on child and adolescent social and emotional development in various contexts, with a focus on emotional temporal dynamics and stress psychophysiology (e.g., respiratory sinus arrhythmia, heart rate, skin conductance) during social interactions. Cui is also interested in emotion socialization in family, school, peer, and cultural contexts, focusing on the impacts of parenting, classroom climate, peer relationships, and cultural values. A second line of Cui’s research concerns mental health and family dynamics among LGBT population in China, including topics such as coming out, gay family types, and LGBT parenting.

Theo Waters

Dr. Waters received his PhD from Emory University in Cognitive and Developmental Psychology. Following that, he was awarded a post-doctoral National Research Service Award (NRSA) to conduct research at the University of Minnesota's Institute of Child Development. His research focuses on the developmental and cognitive mechanisms that account for the enduring effects of early experience across the lifespan. He integrates traditional narrative, developmental, and cognitive methodologies to advance our knowledge of how representations of early experience form, develop and interact with the social environment to influence critical developmental processes. Dr. Waters's research interests include Developmental Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Attachment Theory, Autobiographical Memory, Narrative, Identity, Meaning making, Trauma.

Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng

Dr. Cherng is a sociologist whose scholarly and community-based work focuses on the social lives of marginalized youth. His interests include comparative perspectives on race/ethnicity (with a focus on China and the US), immigrant adaptation, and social capital within the school and educational context. As such, his research examines the social relationships in the lives of minority and immigrant adolescents in the US, gender and ethnic differences in education in China, and cultural and social capital transfers between adolescents in the US. His scholarship has appeared in journals such as American Educational Research Journal, Social Forces, and Teachers College Record. Dr. Cherng received his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 2014, and he has also taught in a charter middle school in San Francisco and a college in rural China.

Siman Zhao

Dr. Zhao is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at University Dayton. Dr. Zhao received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in Interdisciplinary Study of Human Development in 2016. Her research interests are mainly in parenting, peer relationships, children’s socioemotional development, and cultural influence. Her research examines 1) the effects of parenting practices and their interactions with individual characteristics on children’s and adolescents’ development in socioemotional domains; 2) the role of peer relationships and groups in children’s and adolescents’ development; and 3) the implications of macro-level social changes for individual development.

Cong Zhang

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Guangzhen Zhang

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Zongbao Liang

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​Postdocs, PhD Student & Lab Managers

Yufei Gu

Yufei Gu is a PhD student in Developmental Psychology at New York University - Abu Dhabi Global PhD Program, co-mentored by Dr. Theodore Waters and Dr. Niobe Way. She pursued her Bachelor's degrees in Psychology and Interactive Media at NYUAD and her Master's Degree in Learning, Science & Technology at University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education. She has been working on the Nanjing Project since 2016 and is currently working on the follow-up with the adolescent cohort. She conducted her bachelor's capstone project on the relationship between infants' attachment security level and their later development of interpersonal relationships using the Nanjing Project infant cohort data. Yufei is interested in the relationship between children's early childhood experience with caregivers and their attachment representation, mental health, and academic performance later in life. 

Courtney Jones

Courtney joined the Chinese Families Lab at NYU in Spring 2017 as a research assistant and assistant lab manager. She completed her BA in psychology at Carleton College in Minnesota, and will be leaving the lab to begin her PhD work at Northwestern in Fall 2019. During her time with the CFL, Courtney’s research has focused on how mothers and children think about the purpose of friendship and how this might change in response to social and economic changes in China. Her future work will still focus on friendship and parenting, but will pivot to look at how these relationships affect racial identity formation, particularly among multiracial youth. Other interests include crocheting, reading murder mysteries, and petting dogs across NYC.

Rodney T. Lin

Rodney T. Lin is a current fourth-year student majoring in Applied Psychology and Global Public Health at New York University. They joined the Chinese Families lab in early 2019. Their research interests are counseling psychology with a focus on gender and sexuality among Asian populations, and access to mental health care within marginalized groups. They have worked with the Transgender Identity Formation Study (TIFS) since October 2016 as a research assistant and project coordinator. Rodney has also volunteered for the Satellite Baby Project where they assisted in art therapy sessions with the children of Chinese immigrants. Outside of psychology, Rodney's interests include gaming, visual arts, and holistic living.

Victoria Zhu

Victoria is the lab coordinator and a graduate research assistant at the Representations of Early Experiences Lab at New York University Abu Dhabi. She graduated magna cum laude from NYU Abu Dhabi with a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and minors in Social Research & Public Policy, Art History, and Child and Adolescent Mental Health Studies. Her research interests are in assessing maternal sensitivity and parenting variables as predictors of child secure attachment scripts in a Chinese context. Victoria hopes to explore developmental psychology in a clinical setting and work in providing culturally sensitive psychotherapy for children and adolescents.

Mengrun Zhang

Dr. Zhang is a current postdoctoral research fellow at NYU Shanghai, mainly working on the Nanjing MetroBaby Project. Dr. Zhang received her Ph.D. from the Department of Educational Psychology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include parents’ cognitions, emotions, and parenting practices, culture and socialization, as well as child and adolescent social and emotional development.

Rui Yang

Rui Yang is a Ph.D student in NYU's Developmental Psychology Program. While Rui was born and raised in Nanjing, China, she received her undergraduate psychology education in Hungary. Rui then attended NYU's Bilingual School Counseling masters program, which gave her first-hand experience helping adolescents in American urban schools and sparked her curiosity about understanding adolescent development contextually. During M.A. training, Rui began her research into gender socialization after joining Dr. Niobe Way’s Resistance Among Youth lab. After graduation, she joined Dr. Hiro Yoshikawa’s Meta-analysis on Early Childhood Education Evaluations team as a Junior Research Scientist until she began her PhD at NYU. In 2016-2017, she co-directed the MetroBaby 10th year follow-up data collection in Nanjing with over 270 families. Rui’s primary research interest is the process of gender socialization in cultural context. While her primary mentor is Niobe Way from NYU, she is co-mentored by Theo Waters at NYU-Abu Dhabi and she works closely with faculty at NYU-Shanghai. Rui uses both quantitative and qualitative methods in her research. Current projects include: examining mothers’ gender beliefs across cohorts and time in urban China; how Chinese adolescents’ gender beliefs affect their academic and psychosocial outcomes; how adherence to masculinity affect adolescent girls’ psychosocial outcomes in China and USA; how maternal sensitivity during infancy and early childhood predict attachment style in middle childhood and if it differs by gender.

​Research Assistants

Suzy Ji

Suzy Ji is a current fourth-year student majoring in Applied Psychology at Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University. Suzy is interested in mental health counseling and educational psychology. She has been a research assistant since 2021. Her research interests include gender stereotypes, developmental psychology with a focus on Asian populations, and access to mental health care within marginalized groups. She has been volunteering at an NPO, Ark Under the Sky, since 2017 to provide long-term academic assistance and follow-up services of psychological counseling for school-age children living with HIV-infected families in the AIDS village in Hubei, China. Outside of psychology, Suzy is a certified mixologist. Her interests include finance, visual art, petting dogs, Bartending, and writing poetry.

Kexin Chen

Kexin is currently a 2nd-year master student at UPenn Graduate School Education. She majored in developmental psychology and dual major in statistics. Her research interests are socioemotional learning in different contexts, such as peer, family, media, and culture. She was born in China and now study in the U.S. She hopes to gain a deeper understanding of cultural influences on human development through research.

Eva Dong

Eva is an undergraduate student majoring Applied Psychology at Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University. She will complete her BA in Applied Psychology in 2021. Eva is very interested in social psychology and counseling. Other interests include video editing, painting, and exploring fun places in NYC.

Nick Tong

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Qiuyu Zhou

Qiuyu is currently an undergraduate student majoring in Applied Psychology at NYU. She has interests in developmental psychology. By participating in the Chinese Families Lab, she wants to explore how the interactions between parents and children influence their mental health. One other personal interest is to listen to music.

Rainie Li

Rainie is an undergraduate student majoring in Applied Psychology and minoring in French at NYU. She is interested in clinical and counseling psychology and education, and she wants to explore more different areas in Psychology in this lab. She likes swimming and playing the piano.

Rose Wang

Rose is an undergraduate student in the Applied Psychology department at NYU. Rose’s research interests include 1) how parent-child relationships are affected by socio-cultural differences, 2) looking at the mental health among Asian Americans, with a focus on Chinese Americans. Rose is also pursuing a double major in art history. Her other interests include playing squash, visiting museums, and traveling.

Sherry Cheng

Sherry Cheng is a research professional at NYU Perlmutter Cancer Center in the Oncology Clinical Trials Unit. She has a mix of experiences in events management, educational mentorship, and psychotherapy research. Her research interests are child and adolescent psychotherapy outcomes as it relates to environmental and educational factors. She has presented at the national and university levels, including American Psychological Science and American Psychological Association conferences.

Xiao Ling

Xiao obtained two bachelor's degrees in both Clinical Psychology and Child and Family Studies at Fu Jen Catholic University in Taiwan in 2017 and is currently a master's student in the Counseling for Mental Health Program in the Department of Applied Psychology. Xiao’s research interests include 1) how parenting styles affect adolescents’ emotional regulations in Asians and Asian Americans, 2) how the quality of early attachments has an impact on adolescent mental health. Other interests include writing, baking, and photography

Yeyang Tang

Yeyang is a research assistant with the Chinese Families Lab at NYU. She is currently a junior in the undergraduate Applied Psychology program with a Business Studies Minor. Yeyang is interested in gender stereotypes and socio-cultural influences. Clinical Psychology and Industrial Psychology are the two main areas that she might consider pursuing in her future study. Her other leisure interests include cookery, painting, ceramics, traveling and visiting museums.

Yian Chen

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Ying Zhou

Ying Zhou is currently an undergraduate student double majoring in Applied Psychology and Economics at NYU Steinhardt. Ying’s research interests include 1) the effects of parenting styles on children’s perception of masculinity and the development of toxic masculinity in different socio-economic or political contexts, 2) the effects of public policies related to poverty, education, and sexual minority rights, 3) the relationship between gender socialization and consumerism.

Xuqian Li

Xuqian Li is currently an undergraduate student studying gender studies and Child Adolescent Mental Health Studies at Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Li's concentration is the
interdisciplinary major of gender and sexuality in child development. Li's research interests include sex education for children, adolescents, and young adults, and the influence of social construction of gender in child development.

Elaine (Jiajing) Chen

Elaine Chen is currently an undergraduate student double majoring Psychology and Economics at NYU School of Art and Science.

Debbie Wu

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Chen Peng

Chen is doing her master’s degree in Counseling for Mental Health and Wellness program at NYU Steinhardt. She completed her BS in psychology, economics, and math at University of Toronto in Canada. Chen’s research interests include immigrants and international students mental health issues in the US, and how members’ mental health status in Chinese families affects the whole family system. Other interests include music, reading novels, and sports.

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Former Lab Members

  • Azure Zheng
  • Wendy (Cuiying) Huang
  • Anthony Au
  • Philip Huang
  • Karen Huang
  • Courtney Jones
  • Ann (Yian) Guo
  • Kitty (Yuxing) Chen
  • Huajian Gao
  • Sophia Wang
  • Xing Liu
  • Carrie Chen
  • Sihong Hao
  • Jia-Lin Liu
  • YiLin Lee
  • Nancy Li
  • Rodney T. Lin
  • Ruishan Lin
  • Nicole Lui
  • Ninghe Shao
  • Fanya Sun
  • Qian Sun
  • Tina Tu