ADNiR Scholar and Stamps Eminence Scholar Cindy An has earned the Barry Goldwater Scholarship, one of the nation's highest undergraduate research honors in the natural sciences, mathematics, and engineering.
Cindy is one of only eight students selected in psychology. Her proposed work investigates the neural mechanisms of suicidality, self-harm, and affective symptoms in psychotic disorders, using neuroimaging methods to inform future interventions.
Cindy is an ADNiR Scholar in the MEND2 lab, Multifaceted Explorations of the Neurobiology of Depressive Disorders, where she is mentored by Dr. Mindy Westlund Schreiner. In her first year, she was named a Goldwater Scholar, presented a poster at the Society of Biological Psychiatry 2026 Annual Meeting in New York City, and had her first paper accepted for publication.
"I am analyzing how rumination differs neurally in adolescents with non-suicidal self-injury compared to adolescents without. I am also working on setting up preprocessing pipelines and analyses for Mindy's newer ongoing studies."
Cindy's thesis is a collaboration among Dr. Mindy Westlund Schreiner, Dr. Jessica Turner, and Dr. Aubrey Moe. The project examines how reward and emotion regulation networks relate to non-suicidal self-injury in early psychosis.