Bio

Tong Chen is a third-year graduate student in developmental psychology at Penn State. She received her B.S. in Psychology from Tsinghua University, China, in 2018 and her M.S. in Developmental Psychology from Penn State in 2020. Her research is focused on developmental pathways to internalizing problems and substance use in adolescence and young adulthood. One specific aim is to understand how parent anxiety and depressive symptoms are associated with similar problems in children, considering the interplay of genetic, environmental and pubertal influences. She is currently working with Drs. Ashley Linden-Carmichael, Jenae Neiderhiser, and Jennifer Maggs through the Prevention and Methodology Training (PAMT) program to examine the internalizing pathway to substance use. Specifically, she is interested in how different profiles of internalizing and externalizing symptoms in childhood and adolescence are related to substance use in young adults. She is interested in applying innovative methods such as longitudinal structural equation modeling and person-centered analyses (e.g., latent profile analysis) to better answer these research questions.