About Me
Childhood
I grew up in Chambersburg, a town in south-central Pennsylvania near Gettysburg. I am the oldest of three children in a musical family, with a grand piano dominating
the living room and a pipe organ in the basement. As a school student, my favorite subject was math
(I often joked that I would factor all day, if I could), but I also enjoyed learning French and
reading for fun. I performed professionally in theatrical productions at Allenberry Playhouse and
Washington County Playhouse, cantored at church, and competed at district and regional levels for
choir. I graduated third in my class from Chambersburg
Area Senior High School in 1997.
College
I set off for college at the University of Pittsburgh in the
fall of 1997. There, I started out as a math major, but soon was lured away to study how people
think. On top of my joint major in Psychology and Business, I spent a lot of time in college singing
with the Heinz Chapel Choir, an elite a cappella
group, with which I had the amazing opportunity to perform at concert venues in France, Spain, Italy,
and Croatia. I graduated summa cum laude from Pitt in 2001.
Family
I married my college sweetheart, Bill Booth, on June 21, 2002. Bill grew up in Virginia Beach, and came to Pennsylvania to study engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. We met in
1997 when we lived on the same floor in a co-ed dorm. He recieved his B.S. in Chemical Engineering in
2000 and is currently employed as a Technical Specialist for flue gas desulphurization at Carmeuse
Lime. Don't worry, I don’t really understand what he does, either. But here
are some pictures from our wedding.
Bill and I have two beautiful daughters (if we do say so ourselves!). Alison is a precocious
two-year old, who enjoys Backyardigans, pretending she’s a princess, and singing everything she wants
to say. Adrienne is currently seven months old and is very excited about exploring the world, not to
mention all of the solid foods she’s tasting for the first time. They are the joys of my life, and
every day they give me new motivation to understand how children think. Here
are some of my favorite photos of them.
The Road to Academia
While in college, I was introduced to research and worked as a research assistant, first for Kay
Jennings on a project looking at the effects of post-partum depression on toddlers, and then for
Brooke Molina, studying the relation between childhood ADHD and substance abuse in adulthood. I also
completed my own research project examining the extent to which background music affected performance
on a math test for students with varying attention capacities. I credit my advisor on that project,
Mark Strauss, with guiding me into the world of academia and helping me to realize that I belong
there.
I began graduate school in Developmental Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in the fall of
2001, where I studied under Bob Siegler and focused on
the development of numerical estimation skills in elementary school children. After four years, I
completed my Ph.D. and moved on to a post-doctoral position with Ken Koedinger and the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center, where I still am today. I’m
looking forward to the next step…
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