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We investigate how people learn, adapt, develop, and thrive across the full lifespan and across the full range of human minds. Our research spans digital environments, cultural and linguistic contexts, and neurocognitive diversity, always asking the same underlying question: what conditions allow every individual to feel capable, connected, and genuinely part of the learning communities they inhabit?

Our Mission

To produce rigorous, open, and actionable knowledge about meta-learning, development, and well-being across diverse minds, languages, and digital landscapes while training the next generation of scientific thinkers. DSALL is grounded in the belief that developmental science is most powerful when it takes seriously the full diversity of human experience. We study learners who are neurodivergent and neurotypical, monolingual and multilingual, traditional-age and adult, first-generation and continuing-generation, digitally immersed and digitally ambivalent. Our findings are shared openly to have an open dialogue about what we learn.

Join us

DSALL welcomes students interested in research on learning, development, neurodiversity, digital well-being, and bilingual cognition. Faculty and practitioners interested in collaboration are also warmly invited to reach out.

Investigating Lab Directors

Peri Yuksel, PhD | Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, NJCU

Dr. Yuksel earned her Ph.D. in Human Development with a focus on Cognitive Psychology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research and teaching span developmental psychology across cultures, digital mental health, bilingual and cross-cultural cognitive development, trauma-informed pedagogy, and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). She studies psychological and social conditions that shape learning and wellbeing from early development through adulthood, with particular attention to first-generation, immigrant-background, multilingual, and neurodivergent learners.

Dr. Yuksel brings a deeply cross-cultural lens to her work. Her multilingual/-cultural background navigating academic life across languages and cultures is not incidental to her scholarship; it is its foundation.

Her current research examines Academic Fear of Missing Out (FoMO), AI dependence, and digital distress among Gen Z students — investigating how AI-integrated academic environments reshape belonging, self-efficacy, and persistence. She has delivered keynote addresses on AI disruption in higher education and facilitated workshops at minority-serving institutions on digital wellness and responsible technology use. Since 2018, Dr. Peri Yuksel has chaired the Annual NJCU Pedagogy Day, a campus-wide initiative advancing inclusive, innovative, and student-centered teaching and learning to bring together disciplines for open dialogue and exchange of best practices grounded on empirical data.

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Nicolas Zapparrata, PhD | Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, NJCU

Dr. Zapparrata earned his PhD in Educational Psychology with a specialization in quantitative methodology and applied statistics. He worked as a Psychometrician at a testing company for three years before becoming a full-time faculty member at NJCU.  His research includes both the investigation and application of robust statistical modeling techniques across various areas in psychology and education. Dr. Zapparrata's current research focuses on utilizing Bayesian statistics in meta-analyses on clinical groups, applying structural equation modeling to analyze data, and the investigation of information processing in neurodevelopmental disorders. He is also interested in student learning outcomes assessment, promoting statistical literacy through course curriculum/design, and facilitating active learning in students through his instructional approaches. He teaches a mixture of graduate and undergraduate courses that are primarily quantitatively focused, such as, but not limited to Statistics, Experimental Psychology, Research Methods, and Tests and Measurement. More recently, Dr. Zapparrata is collaborating with Dr. Yuksel in researching student loneliness and Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) and has assisted with workshops (i.e., Annual NJCU Pedagogy Day) to facilitate student connectedness at a minority-serving institution. 

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