Grace Dairo(She/Her) is an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto Mississauga, specializing in Neuroscience. She is interested in how experiences and relationships inform personality, identity and behaviour. She is currently assisting at the Chung Lab as an ROP student and UTEA summer fellowship recipient. In her free time, she enjoys reading nonfiction books on a wide variety of topics including history, psychology and self-development. She also loves playing racquet sports like tennis and being active.

Farhia Mohamud (she/her) is an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto Mississauga, specializing in Psychology with a minor in Forensic Science. She was accepted into the Summer Research Opportunity Program (SROP) and received the NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award (USRA) to work as a research assistant in the Chung Lab. Farhia is passionate about social justice and examining the lived experiences of racialized communities. Her interests are rooted in a strong commitment to equity and the amplification of underrepresented voices. In her spare time, Farhia volunteers as a tutor, enjoys reading, and spending quality time with family and friends.

Benjamin Koshy Jacob (he/they) is a Pearson Scholar at the University of Toronto Mississauga. He is specializing in Psychology and minoring in Biology and Biomedical Communication. Benji is also a Laidlaw Scholar and the Giving Voice Project Coordinator at the Chung Lab. His research takes a community-engaged, mixed methods approach to explore QTBIPOC flourishing. He is particularly interested in how emerging adults navigate identity development, relationships, and well-being within broader social structures. Outside of research, he enjoys morning yoga, designing community murals, and a competitive game of squash. 

Jawahir Mohamed (she/her) is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Chung Lab. She is passionate about using mixed-methods, community-oriented, and strengths-based approaches in her research. She is particularly interested in understanding how Black emerging adults make sense of their racial identity and how this relates to their personality development and well-being. Outside of research, she enjoys watching anime and reality TV shows and attending concerts.

Stella Zhang (she/her) is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Chung Lab. Her research takes a narrative approach to exploring how changes in cultural context - such as those brought about by immigration or displacement - shape identity, personality, and well-being. Specifically, she is interested in understanding how people narrate key events in their life (e.g., migration journey, engagement with new social structures), how their personal stories relate to broader master narratives, and how narration facilitates the integration of these experiences into their identity. Outside of research, Stella enjoys running and pilates, vintage shopping, reading, and learning about primates.

Zaiyuan Hu (she/her) is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Chung Lab. She is interested in studying how changes in racialized emerging adults’ personality expression in daily life led to changes in their personality traits in the long term. She is passionate about examining her research questions using various quantitative and qualitative methodologies. During her free time, she enjoys exploring restaurants, bookstores, and vintage shops in Toronto and spending time with her cat.

Dr. Régine Debrosse is Assistant Professor and William Dawson Scholar at the School of Social Work at McGill University. A second-generation Haitian immigrant who grew up in Canada, she completed a PhD in Psychology at McGill University and a postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University, with work focused on race/ethnicity, culture, as well as self and identity. 

Régine Debrosse’s research identifies both challenges faced by young people of colour and of immigrant descent and existing strengths that can be leveraged to support them—with implications for educational and mental health outcomes. A first line of investigation focuses on how they navigate identity dynamics, a second line on how they experience relational ties, and a third line on related programs and interventions. Régine Debrosse’s work direct benefits youths and their communities through ecologically valid methods, such as field experiments, intensive longitudinal designs, and participatory research. Ultimately, this work aims to fight inequalities by co-developing solutions that foster such paths with communities, and by advising the public and policy makers about needed systemic change to support them.

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Sabrina Thai (she/her) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Brock University. She received training in social/personality psychology and examines how social cognitive processes shape a variety of close relationships (friendships, romantic relationship, sibling relationships, parent-child relationships). She is also the lead developer of ExperienceSampler, an open-source scaffold designed to create custom smartphone apps for intensive longitudinal studies, such as daily diaries and experience sampling studies. In addition, she has extensive experience conducting intensive longitudinal studies investigating how a variety of psychological phenomena unfold in daily life, such as how social comparisons affect close relationships, how university students make comparisons in daily life online and offline, how daily exposure to politics influences well-being, whether impression formation processes change depending on the context, and how daily interactions affect individuals’ attitudes towards different groups.