Staff Directory

Jay Holder is a native New Yorker born and raised in the Harlem community. His unwavering interest in people, groups, and institutions impelled him to pursue an undergraduate degree in behavioral science. He is a Program Developer and Research Assistant at the Center for Justice at Columbia University. In the role of Social Justice Ambassador, Jay mainly works with Community Based Organizations (CBO’s) to create healthy environments for communal stakeholders across a spectrum that includes incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals, families, educational institutions, as well as recreational centers. Jay has over a decade of experience working with community organizers, businesses, and youth across the country. He was responsible for Public Affairs at Don Diva Magazine and also managed professional and playground basketball players, such as Corey “Homicide” Williams and Larry “Bone Collector” Williams. Jay is currently a student in the Bridge to PhD Program at Columbia University.

Jarrell E. Daniels is a research assistant at the Center For Justice at Columbia University, where his main focus is on understanding how mass incarceration and criminalization impact minority communities. He is particularly interested in working with others in academia, government, civil society and affected communities to create a new vision for the criminal justice and ultimately shape policies that help individuals, families and communities thrive. Jarrell is a Friends of the Island Youth Leadership peer mentor and a member of the 2018 Justice-In-Education Scholars cohort at Columbia University. Since his release from prison, he has become a sought after speaker on college campuses, where he has shared the experiences that led to his incarceration and that of others from similar communities. Through his work with the community, he offers disciplined advice for at risk and troubled teens re-emerging from Rikers Island and juvenile detention centers throughout NYC.

Since joining the lab in August, Ivan has served as a teaching assistant for courses at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. Ivan is interested in Social Justice as well as Urban Policy. Currently, Ivan is a student in Columbia Universities School of Professional Studies and is a Justice in Education Initiative scholar. Outside of the lab, Ivan is a father, musician and artist.

Prof. Downey's main interest is the study of personal and status based rejection. In her current work, she is exploring people's expectations of rejection and their impact on the perception of other people's behavior, in anticipation of and following social encounters. 

Her work has focused on the personality disposition of rejection sensitivity (RS) and on its association with responses to rejection as well as efforts made to prevent it. This line of work has led her to study sensitivity to rejection based on personal, unique characteristics, as well as sensitivity to rejection based on group characteristics such as race and gender. She has sought to investigate the effect of rejection sensitivity on people's behavior by utilizing various techniques including established social cognition paradigms, experimental studies, physiological recordings, brain-imaging and diary studies. 

Recently, Dr. Downey has been using the knowledge acquired from her research on rejection to develop models of personality and attachment disorders. She has also been interested in the study of identity, specifically on the way in which individuals use their multiple social identities strategically to cope with daily stressors. 

Federica Coppola, PhD, is a postdoctoral scholar in the Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience program at Columbia University and a Lecturer in Criminal Law and Neuroscience at Columbia Law School. Her work uses psychological and neuroscientific knowledge about the role of socio-emotional factors in moral decision-making and social behavior to inform changes in criminal law doctrines, theories of punishment and correctional practices. Currently, her main focus is to use this branch of scientific findings to reform restrictive and retributive approaches to crime and redirect criminal justice towards social rehabilitation. She has published articles and book chapters on criminal culpability, excuse doctrines, punishment, as well as on the use of neuroscientific tools for forensic purposes. Dr. Coppola earned a JD summa cum laude from University of Bologna Law School in 2010 and an LLM in Comparative, European, and International Laws from the European University Institute in 2014. She received a PhD in Law from the European University Institute in 2017. In 2016, she was a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and at the Penn Center for Neuroscience and Society. She has been a lecturer at the School of Law and Neuroscience at the University of Pavia, as well as a lecturer in Criminology at the University of Passau Law School. Prior to joining academia, Federica worked as a criminal defense attorney on cases involving crimes against the person and crimes against public administration.