Heeya Ajwani

Heeya received her B.S. in Psychology and a certification in Social Work from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2026. During her undergraduate years, she worked across several research labs including Dr. Katherine Dixon-Gordon’s Clinical Affective Science Lab at UMass Amherst, Dr. Christian Webb’s Treatment and Etiology of Youth in Depression Lab at McLean Hospital, and Dr. Richard Liu’s Mood and Behavior Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital. Her senior thesis aimed to examine the role of emotional discordance in alexithymia and internalizing psychopathology. Overall, she is interested in the dynamic and context-sensitive nature of affective functioning. Specifically, she wishes to utilize multimodal and computational methods for examining emotional processes and emotion regulation strategies across clinical and non-clinical populations to understand how valence, arousal, and interpersonal factors influence and predict emotional states.