The Hank Virtual Environments Lab consists of faculty, staff, and students with a wide variety of interests from the departments of Computer Science, Psychological and Brain Sciences, and Community and Behavioral Health.

Jodie M. Plumert, Ph.D.

Professor, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences

Education: Ph.D., University of Minnesota, 1990, Child Psychology; B.A., Kalamazoo College, 1985, Psychology

Research Interests: Dr. Jodie Plumert is a Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences and the Russell B. and Florence D. Day Chair in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Iowa. She co-directs the Hank Virtual Environments Lab with Dr. Joseph Kearney. Her research interests include cognitive development, perceptual-motor development, and unintentional childhood injuries. She is especially interested in using virtual environment technology to study how youth make gap decisions and time their movement when crossing roads with traffic. Dr. Plumert is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA) and the Association for Psychological Science (APS). She has served on the executive committee of Division 7 of APA and as an associate editor of the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. 

Email: jodie-plumert@uiowa.edu

Links: Personal Webpage

Joseph K. Kearney, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus, Department of Computer Science, & Collegiate Fellow, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Education: Ph.D., University of Minnesota, 1983, Computer Science

Research Interests: Dr. Joseph Kearney is a Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and a Collegiate Fellow of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Iowa. He co-directs the Hank Virtual Environments Lab with Dr. Jodie Plumert. His current research focuses on behavior, scene, and scenario modeling for virtual environments. With funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Center for Injury Prevention, he is investigating how virtual environments can be used as laboratories for the study of human behavior. He has also published research in psychophysics, computer vision, modeling of human movement, and computer animation.

Email: joe-kearney@uiowa.edu

Links: Personal Webpage

---

Elizabeth O'Neal, Ph.D., MPH

Assistant Professor, Department of Community and Behavioral Health

Education: Ph.D., University of Iowa, 2018, Developmental Science, Psychological and Brain Sciences; MPH, University of Iowa, 2016, College of Public Health; B.S., University of Alabama at Birmingham, 2009, Psychology; B.A., Mississippi State University, 2003, Communications

Research Interests: Dr. Elizabeth O’Neal’s primary research interests focus on understanding the behavioral mechanisms that underlie injury risk among children and adolescents. Dr. O’Neal also translates knowledge of these basic cognitive and behavioral processes that contribute to injury risk into interventions that seek to improve child and adolescent health outcomes. To date, much of her work has focused on 1) how parents use conversations to socialize safety values in children 2) how immature perceptual-motor skills put child pedestrians and cyclists at risk for collisions with motor vehicles, and 3) creating and testing parent-focused interventions to improve teen drivers' hazard anticipation skills.

Email: elizabeth-oneal@uiowa.edu

Links: Personal Webpage 

Ella Mucciolo, MPH, CHES  

Research Associate, Department of Community and Behavioral Health    

Education: MPH, University of Iowa, 2025, College of Public Health; B.S., University of Iowa, 2023, Health Promotion; B.A., University of Iowa, 2023, Global Health Studies          

Research Interests: Ella's research interests include how family dynamics and parent-child communication, as well as the interaction of personal and social factors, influence health outcomes. Most of her current work is focused on improving teen driver safety through parent-focused interventions with Dr. Elizabeth O'Neal in the Childhood Injury Risk Prevention Lab. As a Research Associate, she lends a hand to administrative tasks and lab coordination. In addition to injury prevention work, Ella is passionate about health education, community wellness, and social justice.

Email: ella-mucciolo@uiowa.edu

Links: LinkedIn

---

Ariel (Nam-Yoon) Kim

Ph.D. Student, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences

Education: B.A., University of Notre Dame, 2017, Psychology

Research Interests: Ariel is a Ph.D. student in the psychology open track program. She is interested in developing early interventions to improve child safety behaviors. Her current work focuses on using virtual environments to develop parent training interventions to promote safe road-crossing behaviors in young child pedestrians. She hopes to develop safe road-crossing interventions for both typical and atypically developing young children and their parents.

Email: nam-yoon-kim@uiowa.edu

Shujing Zhang

Ph.D. Student, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences

Education: M.S., University of Nottingham, 2020, Mental Health: Research and Practice; B.S., Chengdu College of Arts and Sciences, 2019, Applied Psychology

Research Interests: Shujing's research focuses on motor control, motor planning, and cognitive development in children. She is particularly interested in online motor control, decision-making, and timing, as well as how these abilities develop across childhood. She also studies how individual differences in processing speed and fine motor development contribute to motor planning and execution. In addition, she is interested in developmental disorders, particularly how they affect motor control and decision-making processes.

Email: shujing-zhang@uiowa.edu

Haemee Chae         

Undergraduate Research Assistant, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences

---

Anna Calegari     

Undergraduate Research Assistant, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences