Linda Maria Trevino is a first-year HDFS PhD student specializing in Child and Adolescent Development. Before she joined the UConn Applied Research on Children (ARC) Lab, she earned her bachelor’s in Psychology with Special Honors from the University of Texas at Austin. There, she conducted her honors thesis, an evaluation of bilingualism, children’s executive functions, and their mathematical capabilities, through Dr. Catharine Echols’ Language Development Lab. Linda designed the research question, methods, and execution, including the development of her own data-collecting platform that met her specific needs. At the University of Texas, she completed the Children and Society: Education, Language and Literacy Bridging Disciplines Program, which required participation in multidisciplinary work and perspectives. During college, Linda worked with children as a camp counselor, preschool teacher, and teacher nanny for a private family. She credits these personal experiences that allowed her to build relationships with children and families for her passion in child development and parenting.
At UConn, Linda hopes to explore programs and interventions that enhance familial relationships, parenting confidence, and parents’ understanding of basic child development with the ultimate goal of creating happy and flourishing families and children. She is guided by her advisor, Dr. Rachel Chazan Cohen, and is currently working on the Connecticut Early Years project, an intervention developed to support healthy family and child development through early childhood programs. Linda aims to use her academic and professional experiences to inform the improvement of existing programs and creation of new ones. She hopes to implement her knowledge of technology, programming, and design throughout her work. Linda’s long-term goal is to close the gap between researchers and parents by making research easy to access, understand, and implement in a variety of limiting situations.
Linda was born in Mexico and raised on the Texas-Mexico border, full of rich history, culture, and delicious food. Outside of academia, she enjoys designing developmentally enriching children’s toys, creating educational activity kits for families to encourage parent-child engagement, knitting, crocheting, sewing, and painting. She also loves to thrift and read old arts and crafts magazines.