2026 Dissertation Award – Anna Vannucci, PhD

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Anna Vannucci, PhD is the Susan Holen Hoeksema Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychology at Yale University working with Dr. Dylan Gee. Her research examines how emotional knowledge develops across childhood and adolescence, with a particular focus on the neural and computational mechanisms that support emotional learning and memory. During her doctoral training at Columbia University under Dr. Nim Tottenham, she investigated how early caregiving experiences shape emotional development using developmental neuroimaging, behavioral experiments, and dyadic ecological momentary assessment. Her dissertation work demonstrated that attachment schema narratives are represented in distributed neural activity patterns during adolescence, are shaped by both early and ongoing caregiving experiences, and are associated with real-world emotional functioning within parent-child relationships. She has received numerous awards for this work including the Sandra G. Wiener Student Investigator Award, the NIH Blueprint D-SPAN F99/K00 Award, and the Flux Society Travel Award. Her current research focuses on understanding how emotional schemas emerge and become organized across development.