Rachel Hantman

Rachel Hantman is a doctoral student in the Clinical-Community Psychology program here at the UofSC and a trainee in the Behavioral-Biomedical Interface Program. She completed her B.S. in Neurobiology at the University of Washington in 2016 and her M.Ed. in Mind, Brain, and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) in 2017. During her B.S., Rachel worked under Dr. Wendy Stone in the Research in Early Autism Detection and Intervention Lab where she studied parental verbal responsiveness to child communicative acts in relation to ASD-risk. Upon graduating with her M.Ed., she worked at HGSE as a Lab Manager under Dr. Gigi Luk, assisting in a study examining learning outcomes of bilingual, dyslexic, and typically developing adolescences through fMRI and eye tracking. She then worked with Dr. Helen Tager-Flusberg at Boston University where she designed and implemented a qualitative study examining how parents of young adults with ASD believe that their children’s sensory sensitivities impact their transition to adulthood. Currently, Rachel is interested in using biopsychosocial ecological approaches to study neurodevelopmental disorders, specifically regarding how factors that surround children (e.g., parental stress, intervention history) impact and interact with their symptomology, behaviors, and neurobiology in relation to their daily functioning (e.g., anxiety, adaptive functioning).