Senior Spotlight: Danielle Moraga (25′ BA Psychology) Working as a CSD research assistant helped fuel a passion to help the deaf community

Tell us about your research experience! The best part was getting hands-on experience with neuroscience and EEG data collection, applying what I’ve learned in my psychology and neuroscience classes. Dr. Sehyr’s guidance helped me deepen my understanding of the brain processes behind reading. I also loved working with participants from the deaf and hearing communities and seeing how our research contributes to language accessibility. Learning to use EEG technology and witnessing real-time brain activity was incredible! This experience sharpened my research, data analysis, and communication skills, preparing me for my future career.

What has been your inspiration? I really wanted to get into research that supported the education I was receiving for my major in psychology and minor in neuroscience. Dr. Sehyr provided an opportunity to use EEG’s to study how the brain supports reading in deaf and hard of hearing individuals. Being able to see the topics I was learning about in action was my biggest inspiration. Additionally, being able to learn so much about deaf individuals experiences and stories was a big part of this project and was very important to me.

Tell us more about working with Dr. Sehyr. Each day involves participant outreach, checking our screening survey, verifying participant’s eligibility, scheduling lab appointments, and preparing the EEG setup. In the lab, I guided participants through the experiments while monitoring brain activity. After sessions, I helped clean the equipment and organize and process data. Every day was a mix of science, problem-solving, and teamwork!

What are your future plans? I will be continuing my education after graduation. I will be getting a PsyD in Clinical Psychology to continue doing research in the field of psychology. Additionally, I hope to get a masters in Global Mental Health to expand my knowledge on psychology in an international setting.

The research study explores whether deaf readers make similar predictions or rely on different strategies during reading. To investigate this, researchers in Cognition, Language and Plasticity (CLaP) Lab used electroencephalography (EEG)—a non-invasive method that tracks real-time electrical brain activity—and a method known as Event-Related Potentials (ERP) to analyze how deaf and hearing readers process words.

CSD Assistant Professor Dr. Zed Sephyr shared “Danielle Moraga was the researcher on this project and spearheaded the participant recruitment and data collection for this project. She has been instrumental in assisting with the lab set up, including developing lab protocols and now also offers some training for incoming researchers. Danielle is a talented and highly motivated UG in Psych (minor Neuroscience) and has worked in my lab pretty much since the lab’s conception in 2024.”