Nathaniel Stekler received his Bachelor of Science degree in psychology from Union College (NY) in 2020 with a minor in philosophy. He graduated with departmental honors, summa cum laude, and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Nathaniel also won the John Lewis March Prize, awarded to a senior who has shown increased interest and ability in psychology during the final two years of college.
Nathaniel joined UConn’s HDFS graduate program in 2021 to work with Dr. Preston Britner, with an interest in early attachments and how adverse childhood experiences can moderate associations of early attachments with personality, emotions, relationships, and worldviews. In addition, he is interested in how adverse environments such as homelessness negatively affect the attachment relationship. He also wants to work to develop interventions and policies that address the impact of adverse childhood experiences on the attachment relationship.
At Union, Nathaniel worked with Dr. Joshua Hart on his senior thesis, examining how personality affects political viewpoints. Specifically, he studied how narcissism affected people’s support for Trump’s immigration policy and ultimately support for Trump himself. Nathaniel presented this research at the 2020 Society for Personality and Social Psychology Conference. Later, Nathaniel and Dr. Hart published this work in The Journal of Social Psychology.
After Nathaniel graduated, he volunteered at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville in Dr. Sarah Lamer’s lab. He assisted in selecting articles and coding verb framing in sentences and images on the topic of sexual assault. Nathaniel continues to collaborate with Dr. Lamer on work that addresses sexual assault stereotypes in the United States.
In addition to volunteering at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, in the year after graduation Nathaniel assisted Dr. Preston Britner and Julie Brisson in a recently submitted systematic review and meta-analysis on the association between adverse childhood experiences and allostatic load across the lifespan.
In his free time, Nathaniel enjoys skiing and hiking. He has a goal of skiing down Mt. Washington and hiking all 48 of the 4,000 ft. peaks in the White Mountains by the end of next year.