Students

Christen Szymanski

Clinical Psychology
Gallaudet University

Christen is a late-deaf adult who currently is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Psychology at Gallaudet. She received her BA in Psychology with a minor in Deaf Studies from Western Maryland College (now McDaniel College) in 2005. Born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland her heart currently belongs to Minnesota. Involved with numerous jobs on and off campus Christen places none higher than her summers at Courage North in Lake George Minnesota. For the past 8 years she has worked with children and adults with physical, emotional, developmental and medical disorders (Autism, Hemophilia, Deafness, CP, MR, MD, MS etc.). These experiences led her to pursue her current doctoral work in Clinical Psychology at Gallaudet.

Currently, Christen is researching the impacts that Autism has on children who are Deaf. More specifically she is looking at the characteristics and symptoms of Autism that may be different because of the child’s visual orientation to the world. Christen is currently working on a dissertation examining deaf children with Autism. In addition she has published 2 papers related to deafness and autism as well as one paper related to using themes from Harry Potter to teach psychology to undergraduate students.

In the past she has been the Graduate Student Association President at Gallaudet. She currently serves as Gallaudet University’s IRB Graduate Assistant. Christen has a clinical externship at Kennedy Krieger Institute at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore doing Applied Behavioral Analysis therapy with children who have developmental interests.

While at Gallaudet she has developed both clinical and research interests in psychodiagnostic test administration of deaf and hard of hearing children and youth. She is currently working on a paper with a team of researchers from Kennedy Krieger Institute examining the positives and negatives of commonly used cognitive assessment tools of children who are deaf. Christen is joining VL2 as a psychometrician and is looking forward to all that VL2 has to offer.

In her free time she likes to go camping and is a bit of a video game nerd, tech savvy geek and Wii gamer. She can often be found at the University of Maryland soccer games, go TERPS! She always enjoy a good laugh and has a sense of humor that is a little off the wall and dry. Her favorite food is Spaghetti O's out of the can and she can honestly say that she is a fan of Moon Sand and fidgets.

The is material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number SBE-0541953. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.