Meet our research team

Meet our team

Jill L Quilici, PhD

Professor
Department of Psychology
California State University, Northridge

Jill L. Quilici, Ph.D., is a Professor of Psychology at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), where she has taught and conducted research since 1997. She earned her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, working with Dr. Richard Mayer and Dr. Mary Hegarty. Her research explores how people think, decide, and reason in everyday life — from the cognitive costs of cell phone use on multitasking, to how mental imagery shapes food consumption, to what drives risky decision-making and susceptibility to conspiratorial thinking around topics like vaccine acceptance. Much of this work is carried out with undergraduate and graduate student collaborators, reflecting her longstanding commitment to mentorship. Her teaching has been recognized with CSUN's Distinguished Teaching Award, and her work has been presented widely at conferences including the Western Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Society for Judgment and Decision Making. Past students have gone into research careers in human factors or experimental research, teaching at the community college, a variety of masters programs (in fields such as school psychology, MFT, and counseling psychology), and doctoral programs at universities such as Pepperdine, UCLA, Claremont Graduate University, UC Merced, Northwestern University, and University of Colorado, Boulder.

Julian Hou

2nd Year Psychological Science Graduate Student

Julian Hou is a second-year graduate student in the Psychological Science program. His research interests center on how people understand and respond to uncertainty, especially when decisions depend on information such as probabilities and odds. He is interested in why the same information can lead people to perceive risk differently and make different choices, including in gambling and other chance-based settings. He is also interested in behavioral game theory and social decision-making, particularly how people reason about the choices of others and navigate situations in which their outcomes are interconnected. 

Victoria Fawcette

2nd Year Psychological Science Graduate Student

Victoria Fawcette is a second-year graduate student in the Psychological Science program at California State University, Northridge. She is currently a part of the Applied Decision-Making Lab and the Social Psychology and Daily Experience Lab. Victoria is interested in social and cognitive psychology, with a focus on how individual and societal factors influence behavior and decision-making. Her work explores the psychological underpinnings of conspiratorial ideation, political orientation, loneliness, and trust in government. She is particularly drawn to understanding how these variables shape our perceptions, beliefs, and choices in complex social environments.

Kian Monajemi

2nd Year Psychological Science Graduate Student

Kian Monajemi is a Psychological Sciences master’s student at California State University, Northridge and a graduate researcher in Applied Decision-Making Lab. His research interests include attention, learning, decision-making, and information processing, specifically in digital and multimedia environments. Additionally, his experiences spans in behavioral research, study development, quantitative data analysis, and statistical methods.

Gabriel Hernandez

2nd Year Clinical Psychology Graduate Student

Gabriel Hernandez is currently a graduate student in the Clinical Fieldwork Master’s Program at California State University, Northridge. Gabriel works under the mentorship of Dr. Quilici, collaborating with fellow graduate students on research related to decision-making. His research interests include religion, anxiety—particularly death anxiety—and risk-taking. He is currently developing an independent research project examining the relationship between religiosity, risk-taking behaviors, and individuals’ thoughts and feelings surrounding death. Through his research, he hopes to better understand how personal beliefs and decision-making processes may influence psychological experiences related to mortality.

Kasra Memarzia

1st Year Clinical Psychology Graduate Student

Kasra Memarzia is a first-year graduate student in the Clinical Psychology (Research Option) Master’s Program at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). He is currently in the Applied Decision-Making Lab, where he also conducted research during his undergraduate career at CSUN. Kasra is interested in clinical and cognitive psychology, with a particular interest in the treatment of anxiety, depression, OCD, and PTSD. His research aims to examine how individual differences in cognitive characteristics may contribute to anxiety and how identifying these characteristics inform more individualized treatment.