Kaylee Litson

“I love that I’ve already been able to be involved in so many different research projects in just my first year. I most likely wouldn’t have the time to do what I’m doing right now if I didn’t have the PDRF.”

Working closely with mentor Dr. Christian Geiser, Kaylee’s research focuses on psychology methodology.

“It’s actually the research before you do the research,” she said. “What we do in our lab is either come up with new methods or revise existing methods or try to fit methods to data. We work to fit a lot of different models so we can explain the variability within them..”

The core of her research is that of traits—such as personality and mood traits—and separating the variability between them to see where the data is coming from.

“We look to see if it’s trait-specific data, if it’s an actual trait, if it fluctuates over different occasions or if different raters report these traits for one person differently if it’s method-specific.”