Lab Director
Dr. Naomi Sadeh joined the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at University of Delaware in 2016. She was previously Assistant Professor at Boston University School of Medicine and a principal investigator in the National Center for PTSD at VA Boston Healthcare System. She received her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2004 and her doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2012. She completed a clinical internship and postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco. She is also a licensed Clinical Psychologist.
Impaired impulse control contributes to major public health problems, including crime, suicide, violence, and addiction. Dr. Sadeh’s program of research focuses on understanding the causes of impulsive behavior, and the complex interplay of factors that contribute to impulsivity and related health problems. The foundation of her research is based on the idea that individuals who struggle with self-control do so for different reasons. To capture this variability in the causes of impulsive behavior, she examines the interplay of a wide range of risk factors and causal mechanisms along a continuum of severity from normative to pathological. She uses a multilevel framework in her conceptualization and analysis of impulsive behavior and related public health problems that spans biological (genetics, neurobiology), psychological (clinical symptoms, cognition-emotion interactions), and environmental (trauma, sociostructural forces) units of analysis. This approach informs complexity in the foundations of human behavior and how core regulatory processes go awry in mental illness.
- Google Scholar webpage
- Updated CV
- DBT for Reentry Court website
- Email: nsadeh@udel.edu
Doctoral Students
Samantha Haas is a Clinical Science doctoral student in the PD Lab. She received her B.S. in Neuroscience and her B.A. in Psychology from the University of Delaware in 2023, where she assisted in research in the labs of Dr. Naomi Sadeh and Dr. Peter Mende-Siedlecki. She continued to earn her M.S. in Neuroscience in 2024 from the University of Delaware, working with Dr. Peter Mende-Siedlecki on her thesis entitled “Emotion Perception: The Influences of Target Gender Identity, Gender Appearance, and Race.” Samantha’s current research aims to further the understanding of risk factors––namely trauma, discrimination, and sexual orientation––contributing to incidences of self-injurious behaviors, especially non-suicidal self-injury and suicide.
Updated CV Email: shaas@udel.edu
Wendy Huerta is a Clinical Science graduate student in the PD Lab. She received her B.A. in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, where she conducted and assisted in research in Dr. Mark D’Esposito and Dr. Allison Harvey’s Lab. Following graduation, she worked as a research coordinator in the Anxiety and Depression Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. Broadly, Wendy is interested in cognitive (e.g., working memory, inhibitory control) and emotion interactions, which may lead to psychopathology, and utilizing multi-method approaches to understand underlying mechanisms. She is currently supported by a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation. Email: whuerta@udel.edu
Ana Sheehan is a Clinical Science graduate student in the PD Lab. She received her B.A. in Cognitive Science and French from Vassar College in 2017. After graduating she joined the Mood and Behavior Lab at Brown University, where she worked on studies examining underlying mechanisms of risk for self-injurious thoughts and behaviors among adolescents. Ana’s current research aims to better understand how environmental, neurocognitive, and affective mechanisms confer risk for self-injurious thoughts and behaviors. She is currently supported by a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation.
