LEAH Profiles

Karen Grippo
Karen Grippo is currently a doctoral student working with Dr. Stacey Tantleff Dunn in LEAH. She earned her MA in Counseling Psychology from the State University of New York at New Paltz and her BA in Psychology and Sociology from the State University of New York at Geneseo. Karen's research interests focus on protective factors in promoting and maintaining healthy body image and eating behaviors across the adult lifespan. She is currently examining empowerment and feminist attitudes as moderators between self-objectification and body dissatisfaction, eating disturbance, and experiences with aging.

Sharon Hayes
Hello! My name is Sharon Hayes and I work with Dr. Stacey Dunn in the Laboratory for the Study of Eating, Appearance, & Health. My research in the areas of body image and eating behavior is focused primarily on young children and families. Examples of my interests include sociocultural factors associated with the development of body dissatisfaction, prevention and intervention strategies for obesity, and the role of mindfulness in obesity interventions.

Danielle Lindner
I am primarily interested in further exploring the link between appearance-related social comparisons and body image. I am also working on a project related to male body image.

Elizabeth Schuster
Hello! My name is Liz Schuster and I joined the Laboratory for Eating, Appearance, and Health in 2008. I am originally from NY, so I am enjoying the warm winters and lack of snow here in Orlando! I am extremely interested in the field of body image and eating disorders and am so excited to be working with Dr. Stacey Tantleff-Dunn and the rest of the LEAH Lab here at UCF. I have worked as a group therapist and research assistant in a partial hospitalization program for eating disorders,where I learned much about the influences that relationships and feedback can have on the development and maintenance of negative body image and eating disorders. I hope to further explore this topic with a research project exploring the relationship between parental appearance-related feedback on male body image.

Elizabeth Wack
Elizabeth "Betsy" Wack graduated from the University of Florida in 2005 and returned to her hometown to study body image and eating disorders under Dr. Stacey Tantleff-Dunn. Currently, her research interests are media influences (and particularly electronic gaming) on body image formation, and neuropsychological profiles associated with eating disorders and body image disturbance. Betsy hopes to someday extend her research findings to the development of empirically based prevention and intervention protocol for body image disturbance.