Dr. Dawn P. Witherspoon is a Professor of Psychology and Director of PACT (Parents And Children Together) in
the Department of Psychology at The Pennsylvania State University. She obtained a B.A. in Psychology and English and an M.A. in Psychology from North Carolina
Central University in 2000 and 2001, respectively, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Community Psychology from New York University, in 2005 and 2008, respectively. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Center for Developmental Science and in the Department of Psychology’s Black Child Training Grant Program. After that, she joined The Pennsylvania State University in 2010. Dr. Witherspoon is interested in how
context shapes adolescent development. Her work focuses on neighborhood, school, and family factors that affect adolescents’ socioemotional and academic adjustment. In addition, she examines how race, ethnicity, and other cultural
attributes interact with contextual characteristics to influence adolescent outcomes. A goal of her research is to elucidate the development of urban and rural adolescents, with particular attention to contextual supports.
Dr. Mayra Y Bámaca is an Associate
Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of California, Merced.
She obtained her B.A. in Psychology from California State University,
Northridge in 2001, her M.S. in Human and Community Development from the
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2004, and her Ph.D. in Human
Development and Family Studies from Arizona State University in 2008. Before joining
the University of California, Merced, she worked as an Assistant Professor and
then Associate Professor at the Pennsylvania State University from 2008 to
2020. Dr. Bámaca’s research focuses on Latine and minoritized youth’s
adaptation at the intersection of individual (puberty, age), contextual
(parents, friends, neighborhoods), and sociocultural (acculturation) processes
within racialized contexts. Her work has provided a more nuanced understanding
of the unique and combined influence of multiple social contexts (peer,
neighborhood) in the development and adaptation of U.S.-born and immigrant
Latine adolescents. She is currently a Consulting Editor for the Journal of
Research on Adolescence and is part of the advisory board for the Horowitz Early
Career Scholars Program for the Society for Research in Child Development.
