Meet Our Graduate Students
Ashley Splain
Sixth-year Graduate Student
Ashley is a 6th-year graduate student in the CACHE lab earning her PhD in both clinical psychology and behavioral medicine. In 2015, she graduated from Boston College with a B.S. in Biochemistry and spent the next several years engaged in research focused on health disparities among individuals with serious mental illness at the Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine.
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After starting at UMBC in 2019, she became interested in specifically exploring disparities related to type 2 diabetes, focusing on the influence of sociocultural factors on the incidence of this disease. She has a primary focus on diabetes awareness and has explored this topic in projects examining the relation between diabetes risk perception and acculturation and examining the relation between psychological factor and undiagnosed diabetes.
Broadly, Ashley is interested in learning how advanced statistical techniques can be used to better explore these complex constructs and has thus spent time in graduate school enhancing her skills in advanced statistical techniques such as structural equation modeling and mixed effects regression for longitudinal data.
Sumaiya Delane
Fifth-year graduate student
Sumaiya is a fifth year graduate student in the CACHE lab. She graduated from Vanderbilt University in 2018, where she gained early experience with measures of psychophysiology in the Emotion and Anxiety Research Lab (EARL). Post graduation, she also spent two years as a Research Technician at the National Center for PTSD, VA Boston. In this role, she contributed to projects exploring trauma exposure, cardiometabolic conditions, and psychophysiological factors.
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In 2020, Sumaiya joined the HSP program, specializing in the behavioral medicine and clinical tracks. Sumaiya’s primary research interests lie in the biopsychosocial factors underlying cardiometabolic health and disease, including the interface of cardiometabolic processes, stress and mood disorders, cognition, and health disparities.
Currently, her work focuses on how psychophysiological factors such as heart rate variability can be used to better understand the relationship between anxiety symptoms and glucose regulation, with attention to social support and resilience factors. She is also interested in how early life experiences interact with these factors to influence cognitive health.
Sally Ho
First-year graduate student
Sally is a first-year graduate student in the Human Services Psychology Doctoral Program at UMBC, Clinical Psychology and Behavioral Medicine tracks.
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Sally attended undergraduate at Texas Christian University in Ft Worth, TX. Here, she developed a strong interest in the intersection of psychology and health under the mentorship of Dr. Summer Mengelkoch, a former graduate student in the Health & Relationship lab led by Dr. Sarah Hill. In her senior year, Sally continued to explore these research topics and developed her statistical skills by working with large datasets as a Psycho-Oncology research intern at UT Southwestern Moncrief Cancer Institute under Dr. Laura Howe-Martin.
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In 2022, after graduation, Sally joined the Behavioral Diabetes Team at Children's National Hospital in Washington, DC. In this role, she was the site coordinator for a multisite trial testing feasibility and acceptability of mindfulness-based intervention for adolescents at risk for type 2 diabetes and depression. Honing her research skillsets under Dr. Eleanor Mackey, Sally solidified her interest in using the biopsychosocial approach to understand mood, behaviors, and health outcomes. With this approach, Sally seeks to explore how stress physiology, environmental, and socioeconomic stressors influence mood, lifestyle behaviors, health outcomes, and disease progression in families with a history of cardiovascular and/or cardiometabolic diseases, such as type 2 diabetes.
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While not working, you can find Sally knitting, thrifting/antiquing around the DMV area, plant-caring, baking, and trying hard to finish the Dune Chronicles.
