Yale Child Study Center (YCSC)—which serves as the Department of Child Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine—welcomes and introduces new community members on a voluntary and ongoing basis. All new faculty, staff, and trainees are invited to share bios and photos upon joining the department. Those who wish to participate are announced in groups throughout the year.
Sean Morfin joined the Cha Lab as a postgraduate associate in February. He graduated from St. Bonaventure University in May 2025, where he studied psychology and played on the men's soccer team. He then joined Yale as a summer research intern in the Emotion, Health, and Psychophysiology Lab.
After his internship, Morfin joined the Cha Lab as a trainee, assisting in research focused on understanding suicidal thoughts and behaviors among adolescents. His research interests include psychological processes related to decisions that can lead to suicidal, self-harming, or risky behaviors. He is also interested in how these behaviors relate to mental health conditions. He plans to pursue a PhD in clinical psychology.
Jinglei Ren joined YCSC as a postdoctoral associate in January. Her research explores how cognitive learning mechanisms shape language acquisition and reading development in children. She uses behavioral, neuroimaging, and computational approaches in her work.
Ren works to understand how statistical learning and repetition support language processing. She studies how these learning mechanisms influence reading development. She is also interested in how print-speech integration, how the brain connects written and spoken words, breaks down in reading disorders. Her research has been published in several scholarly journals, including Developmental Psychology, Journal of Educational Psychology, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Memory & Cognition, and Reading and Writing.