REC Team

Emily Aisenbrey is a Morris S. Viteles Fellow in the Interdisciplinary Studies in Human Development Ph.D. program. Emily was a special education teacher and instructional coach for 6 years in New Orleans and Chicago Public Schools. In 2016, she earned her Master’s from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Prevention Science and Practice, a program focused on designing and evaluating interventions for young people. She went on to work as the Director of Education for Character Lab, a research-practice partnership dedicated to advancing scientific insights that help kids thrive. While at Character Lab, she founded a youth advisory council and internship program for high school students. Emily’s current research centers on enhancing adolescents’ and teachers’ ability to cope with racial stress in school and reducing racial discipline disparities in school. Emily’s other research interests include promoting youth voice, youth-participatory action research, and continuous improvement in educational spaces.

Janay Garrett is a 5^th year Ph.D. candidate in the Interdisciplinary Studies in Human Development Program. She serves as REC’s social media and website communications coordinator. Currently, Janay’s work focuses on the feminized labor of Black mothers, also known as m(other)work, a framework that explores the various ways Mothers of Color (in a non-traditional, non-binary sense) actively resist a splintering of their identities, collectively fight for the freedom and livelihood of their children and selves and invest in the intergenerational care of their communities at large. Janay also explores the way that m(other)work as a framework, can be utilized to critically assess current mental health care for Black women during their developmental transition to motherhood and expand future work around mental health care/intervention.

As a parenting doctoral student, Janay has worked with Penn’s Family Resource Center to promote changes for parenting students, participated in a variety of conversations about the intersections of critical race theory, mothering, and activism, and has mentored fellow Black graduate students. In the Spring of 2017, Janay was named The Graduate School of Education’s Student Government President’s Community Leadership Award and has been the recipient of the Family Resource Center’s Ph.D. Family Grant two consecutive years. In the Spring of 2020, she was awarded The President Gutmann Leadership Award, Fontaine Society Spring Travel Grant & The Research Focus on Black Education SIG Graduate Student Travel Award (AERA).

Prior to Penn, Janay attended and graduated with her master’s degree in education from California State University Long Beach. During her work at CSULB, Janay collaborated with her advisor to explore the history of racial microaggressions in children’s literature. Her unpublished master’s thesis titled: “The Critical Race Socialization of Black Children” (2018), explored the ways Black activist/organizer mothers resist institutionalized racism in how they raise their children

Selected Publications

Anyiwo, N., Palmer, G. J., Garrett, J. M., Starck, J. G., & Hope, E. C. (2020). Racial & Political Resistance: An Examination of the Sociopolitical Action of Racially Marginalized Youth. Current Opinion in Psychology.

Garrett, J.M. (2018). The Critical Race Socialization of Black Children. California State University, Long Beach.

Sasha C. Mejía-Bradford is a Latina scholar from southern California, a current doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education, in the human development program. Her research interests focus on the ethnic-racial socialization of Latinx adolescents, and the healing potential of racial literacy to address acculturation stress and cultivate healthy familial ties amongst Latinx parents and youth. Having spent six years in the classroom as a high school educator, she values adolescent and teacher voices and places them at the core of her research. She holds two master’s degrees, an M.Ed. in Secondary Education from Eastern New Mexico University and a second M.A. in Program Evaluation and Improvement Research from the University of Michigan. After working as a Research and Evaluation Manager at the University of Michigan—ADVANCE, she understands the importance of disseminating equitable and transparent quantitative findings using statistical analysis.

Keriann Mosley is a 1st-year doctoral student in the Interdisciplinary Studies in Human Development Program. Their work focuses on parent/guardian advocacy in communities of color, particularly in cases of disciplinary action and procurement of resources/supports. Previously, they completed their Master's at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education. Before beginning postgraduate studies, they worked as a Research Fellow with the Early Childhood Cognition and Emotions Lab at West Chester University, where they helped carry out federally funded research looking at the positive impacts of arts education in Head Start programs. Their general research interests include: how the history of racism in educational institutions affects how children navigate the school system and eventually life, how parents are imparting generational knowledge and advocacy skills to children, and the intersections of neurodivergence, race, and academic success.

Sean is an educator by profession, having taught grades 6-9 math and science for four years in Houston, TX from 2011-2015 before transitioning to graduate school at Penn GSE for education research in developmental psychology - his area of study in undergrad at The Ohio State University.

He served as an after-school program director and summer camp coordinator in the Philadelphia-based non-profit organization EducationWorks, where he used his background in education and developmental psychology to provide extracurricular academic and social enrichment services for 40 low-income students (grades K-5), professional development training for 13 high school youth workers, and training for program staff on health & safety, conflict-resolution, behavior management, psychosocial/socio-emotional intervention, curriculum development, lesson planning, and lesson implementation.

At Penn, Sean was a T.A. for two of Dr. Howard Stevenson's Afropsych courses - "Psychology of the African American", and "Psychoeducational Interactions with Black Males". He also served as lead instructor for the "Developmental Theories and Applications with Adolescents" course through GSE's Urban Teaching Apprenticeship Program, as well as an adjunct psychology professor teaching "General Psychology" through Eastern University's Prison Education Program for inmates at SCI-Chester working toward their Associate's degrees.

As an AERA member, Sean's research interests are reflected in his involvement with the SIGs for:

• Mentorship and Mentoring Practices
• Adolescence and Youth Development
• Stress, Coping, and Resilience
• Spirituality and Education
• Caribbean/African Studies in Education
• Studying and Self-Regulated Learning
• Social and Emotional Learning

Dr. Keisha L. Bentley-Edwards is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and the Associate Director of Research at the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. She is a developmental psychologist and race scholar who uses and creates culturally relevant measurement to understand the experiences of youth. Dr. Bentley-Edwards studies how cultural strengths, including racial socialization, racial cohesion, and religion, can be used to buffer the negative effects of discrimination, bullying, and community violence on health, social, and education outcomes. Although most of her work focuses on African American children and families, she also studies the racial conversations that occur in White families and with White practitioners to inform anti-racism strategies. Her NIH-funded research examines how religious affiliations and spirituality influence cardiovascular risk factors for Black adults.

Read more about Dr. Bentley-Edwards