The Identity in Context Lab includes an interdisciplinary group of scholars with interests spanning social and developmental psychology, economics, and legal studies. Many of the Ph.D. students work with additional research groups at Yale, including the Social Perception and Communication Lab and Leonard Learning Lab.
David Silverman
Principal Investigator, Assistant Professor
Dr. Silverman examines the psychological and material forces that shape young people’s access to opportunity with an emphasis on creating new programs for addressing educational and economic inequalities.
Email: d.silverman@yale.edu
Brandon Carillo
6th year Ph.D. student
Brandon studies children’s early models of care: specifically, how their earliest and closest social partners—their caregivers—shape socio-cognitive development and influence how they learn about the broader world.
Email: brandon.carrillo@yale.edu
Elaine Wang
4th year Ph.D. student
Elaine studies how young children leverage information from the social world (e.g., adult messages, incentive structures) to form beliefs about their own competence and guide decisions about effort allocation.
Email: elaineyilin.wang@yale.edu
Aarthi Popat
3rd year Ph.D. student
Aarthi’s research examines the cognitive mechanisms underlying beliefs about equity and merit across the lifespan.
Email: aarthi.popat@yale.edu
Maya Rabinowitz
3rd year Ph.D. student
Maya broadly studies how empowered groups learn to recognize and act against systemic racism, and she is passionate about the translation of intergroup psychology into equitable social policy.
Email: maya.rabinowitz@yale.edu
Kai Sheu
3rd year Ph.D. student
Kai is interested in how people form social and moral impressions, particularly in contexts involving harm, victimization, and responsibility.
Email: chengkai.sheu@yale.edu
Arielle Belluck
2nd year Ph.D. student
Arielle’s research focuses on how parents’ and children’s expectations of each other create a dyadic cycle of overparenting.
Email: arielle.belluck@yale.edu
Justice Brown
1st year Ph.D. student
Justice’s research interests surround the ways in which academic and legal systems reproduce inequity and in turn shape feelings of belonging and well-being amongst communities of color.
Email: justice.brown@yale.edu
Saba Shah
Postgraduate Associate
Saba’s research examines how social structures create and sustain inequality and how they interact with family systems to shape achievement, opportunity, and well-being.
Email: saba.shah@yale.edu
