Alisa Beyer

Since graduating from the U of AZ, I went on to graduate school at the University of Kansas. I completed my PhD in Psychology last year, with an emphasis in cognitive development. My career stemmed from many decisions and experiences at the U of AZ. While at KU, I worked with Dr. Andrea Greenhoot, who had been a postdoc at the U of AZ. At Arizona, I worked on a research project with her my junior year under Dr. Laura McCloskey. My senior year I worked under Janet Nicol, and her graduate student, Jason Barker, comparing monolinguals and bilinguals on a lexical ambiguity task. The honors thesis was inspired from work I had done with Dr. Usha Goswami at the University College London during the summer between my junior and senior year. To be able to do a research abroad experience, I contacted Dr. Paul Bloom-who was my introductory psychology instructor. I told him my grand idea of going to London and doing research. He made some contacts and Usha agreed to have me go work with her after sending her a statement of my interests and letters of recommendation. While working for Usha, I assisted in data collection for a study examining reading of nonwords that sound like real words compared to both reading of nonwords (but make not look like real words called pseudohomophones) that sounded and looked similar to real words and reading of nonwords that were dissimilar is sound and sight to real words. It was during that summer I decided that I wanted to pursue a Ph.D. with a research emphasis in cognitive development. I am been toying with the idea, but the summer experience solidified my decision. For graduate school, it was a nature fit to continue on working with Andrea at KU whose work focuses on children’s memory development.

After years of hard work at KU completing doctoral work, I am now an Assistant Professor at Dominican University in River Forest, IL. Dominican is a small private, Catholic, liberal arts college. At DU, I teach developmental courses as well as statistics and research methods. Part of my teaching includes involving students in research. My research focuses on reminiscing and autobiographical memory in young children. My research interests include parent-child interactions and their influence on children’s cognitive processes, parent-child reminiscing, social construction of memory, the role of knowledge in cognitive processes, implications of memory research for children's testimony.

On a personal note, I am now married and have a darling two-year old girl-who is being raised to love U of AZ and KU basketball.